


Beyond the Edge of Our Hope

by Seek_The_Mist



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Blood and Violence, Canon parallels in AU setting, Canonical Character Death, Drift Compatibility, Epic Battles, Explicit Sexual Content, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning, Jaeger Pilots, M/M, Multi, Sabotage, Warfare & Post-warfare setting, Wordcount: Over 100.000, Wordcount: Over 150.000, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-02-21 17:13:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 170,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18706747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seek_The_Mist/pseuds/Seek_The_Mist
Summary: In every story worth telling, a hero would rise to the challenge of monsters and win the battle to save the world. No one had ever bothered to tell Ronan about the fate of a hero in a world that had overcome the edge of disaster.The Pacific Rim has been closed for more than three months, in the most impressive feat of the Jaegers and the Pan Pacific Defence Corps, when Ronan Lynch comes back alone from a surprise attack to the Greywaren. The world has been saved from the apocalypse but greed towards formidable weapons is quick to return. The Shatterdome will have to brace for the impact and find a way to counter the threat even before fully understanding it.A story of shattered people, scarred families and found families. A story about what you stand for, when destruction comes from the shadows. Beyond saving the world, this is a story about finding your place in it.Written for The Raven Cycle Big Bang 2019





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At last, we’re finally here, starting the publication of a story that stated as monumental and ended up even _more_ monumental, because I’m nothing if not consistent with myself.  
> I’ve never written so much in my life and I’m deeply in love with this universe.
> 
> Art for this story will be provided by Rachel [(purrsnicket)](https://purrsnicket.tumblr.com/) and Is [(spaceykiddo)](https://thenightfury.co.vu/)
> 
> Rachel in particular has been the pillar of a significant part of this show, and you have her to thank for the fact that this is work is betaed thorough. Your hype was my hype, darling, and we were truly a dream team.
> 
> People without which this wouldn’t have happened: Kieran [(kieranfae)](http://kieranfae.tumblr.com/) and Brie [(Akumastrife)](http://akumastrife.tumblr.com/) who took great care of me and were the best support I could have hoped for. All my thanks to Stillwatersea and Dragonmage27, who read through parts of this fic without knowing anything of it, and all the people (looking at Lola and Interropunct in particular) who kept cheering through it. 
> 
> You can find background material of this fic in the form of countdown on my tumblr:  
> [(Day -7)](https://seekthemist.tumblr.com/post/184473458333/template-modified-from-marvel-oc-civilian) ; [(Day -6)](https://seekthemist.tumblr.com/post/184496108821/day-6-jaeger-mark-iii-1-greywaren-day-7) ; [(Day -5)](https://seekthemist.tumblr.com/post/184520282185/day-5-helen-gansey-richard-gansey-iii-day-6) ; [(Day -4)](https://seekthemist.tumblr.com/post/184543838950/day-4-jaeger-mark-iii-2-glendower-day-5-helen) ; [(Day -3)](https://seekthemist.tumblr.com/post/184566898093/day-3-maura-sargent-calla-johnson-persephone) ; [(Day -2)](https://seekthemist.tumblr.com/post/184590761932/day-2-jaeger-mark-iii-3-fox-day-3-maura) ; [(Day -1)](https://seekthemist.tumblr.com/post/184624452259/seekthemist-rating-explicit-total-wordcount)
> 
> This has truly been a BIG BANG.
> 
> Please enjoy.

  
  
  


Dawn had yet to break but the sky was starting to tinge a lighter shade of blue. All around, water and air merged, crystal clear, on the endless horizon provided by the ocean. 

They had dragged another spawn of the Pacific Rim onto an island that used to be a military base, in times when hell didn’t rise from the sea every day. Now, it lay abandoned. All the more reason for Niall and Ronan forgo any reservation and grapple the creature by its lower jaw, smashing it against a crumbling building. 

The reinforced concrete collapsed completely under the strength of the impact. The remaining steel bars pierced the creature in multiple points, all highlighted in orange on the report screen. That wouldn’t cause any real damage, just a growing fury from the beast. It gnawed at the Jaeger’s arm, oozing dense, bubbling spit. 

_Corrosive_ , the screen reported. _Outer shell compromised in t_estimate = 00.17.21_. 

“Pathetic,” Niall declared, and dug very purposefully into the control handles. The Jaeger’s hand lodged more deeply down the creature throat.

Back in the days when there was still an apocalypse to cancel, corrosion came with bare seconds of warning — often superfluous, as the overwhelming burn would already be transferring to both of their arms. That was also a time when the wonder of Jaeger Mark-III-1, codename Greywaren, had carried the weight of the world on its shoulders: a member of the last generation of impossible mobile weapons of mass destruction, and the only one capable of opening a warp through the same power of the drift that was moving it. Through the warp — the _Dreamcatcher_ — Ronan and his father had done everything to flip the battlefield, years after years: they could manifest weapons on the field, leap at impossible speeds, across impossible distances. There had been days when Ronan had thought they could do everything, anything, as long as they pictured it when piloting.

As it was, however, the Rim had been closed for three months, twelve days, and probably 18 hours — give or take — and the only thing left to do for the Pan Pacific Defense Corps was getting rid of stray underdogs.

It was nothing like real Kaiju, the monsters they had followed all the way down the bottom of the ocean. Night looked luminous in comparison to what had awaited them in those depths.

These were more like discarded supporting creatures, barely-hatched eggs, half-autonomous extremities that had been cut off from bigger Kaijus. The only thing that could have survived after the closing of the Rim, in theory.

Still, Ronan wanted them annihilated. Viciously.

It would be good, he thought, to cut this one from inside out. They already had one hand in, they might as well lay waste from there.

“That’s pretty nice,” Niall said, from beside him, catching Ronan’s thoughts in the drift. “Remember Pohnpei?”

Ronan remembered Pohnpei, and even if he didn’t, his father had a clear recollection of that Godforsaken island in the middle of Micronesian nowhere. The rainforest had been a mess full of slimy vines, with the Kaiju almost embedded in it, and they had to cut down a portion of the trees to reach for the creature. The chainsaw had been rough but designed to be a perfect fit for Greywaren — for the two of them to use it as a weapon as well as a tool. 

“Yes, it must be still in the hangar.”

That was something he could have — something the warp could give them.

Ronan could picture it, threatened by rust as all their equipment was after prolonged exposure to fighting at sea. It had been so loud, and slightly off-axis in a way that had made Greywaren’s arm shake with the vibrations. Very inconvenient for precision jobs, but this wasn’t one. 

“Spot-on,” Niall approved. From his father’s mind came a more precise stream of specifications, wiring interface, and initialisation protocols. 

Outside, reflecting their mostly-wordless planning, part of the joints on Greywaren’s forearm lifted, just above the point where the creature’s teeth were digging. 

Ready. Waiting.

“Lynch! Are you warping?!” The comms came alive with a female voice, all the way from the headquarters and indistinctly referring to either of them.

Ronan could sense the disapproval, so of course he just replied, “Yup.”

Niall smiled, thin and dangerous — Ronan looked at him even though he might as well stare forward and focus on the job. But the job was boring, and Ronan’s habit of checking on his father and tracing the steps to follow was as old as this charade, maybe older.

They breathed in, then out, in an easy synch.

The warping built up from afar, like the smell thickening between two lightning strikes in a thunderstorm. It spread, electric, through their drift. Ronan could almost taste it, tingling along his tongue — and his father tasted it too, their minds close and perfectly matching. 

When it sparked, it was bright enough to be blinding. Everyone always insisted nothing of the sort really happened, but that was the experience of it — surreal light and then complete darkness, disorienting as if they had just passed out, for two seconds only. 

“ _Gadget equipped_ ,” the thin, disembodied voice of Greywaren notified them.

Ronan clenched his left command handle, and followed his father in readjusting the Jaeger stance. He weighed in, pushing through the fog of his mind. Somewhere in the pilot chamber — or through the drift — Niall said, “Hit it.”

Ronan gave a sharp tug.

Through the woofers that connected them to the outside world, the clatter of a chainsaw filled the air, louder than Ronan himself had remembered. 

Outside, the creature that had been gnawing on Greywaren’s arm was now thrashing around a chainsaw that hadn’t been there two seconds earlier. 

The alien flesh resisted against the motion of the rotating saw — hard enough to clattering along Jaeger’s arm, Ronan’s own arm — but there was no helping the sudden invasion. One weak, soft spot gave in, and all the other followed, unravelling. It was violent and gruesome, slime and flesh flying through the air. Niall held the Kaiju still, unforgiving, until there was nothing left but scattered remains writhing on the island’s barren soil. 

They snickered in unison, and moved in perfect synch through the maneuvering harness. Greywaren stepped on a particularly big chunk of creature, the chainsaw still idly on and dragging along ruined asphalt. The terrifying cacophony of the chain cutting through the road only stopped when they turned off the saw.

Ronan breathed in and Niall breathed out, high on each other’s adrenaline. 

Without the edge of fury and hopelessness that had dragged them year after year, tragedy after tragedy, this was fundamentally enjoyable. Effortless like a sport they both trained to perfection.

Somewhere, simmering through their connection, Ronan knew he had met his father’s expectations, felt the _pride_ of it. 

“I believe this is the operative definition of an overkill,” a long-suffered remark came from the comms with the same voice that reprimanded them before. 

With the battle-engaged mode automatically deactivating, the live-feed from the Shatterdome popped up at the bottom of the huge multifunctional window that spanned half of the piloting hutch. The video distorted colours terribly with the night-vision setting, but Maura Sargent would always be instinctively familiar. 

“Come on, Sarg, we’re here clearing garbage.” Niall didn’t sound at all chastened, idly running diagnostics. They might want to bring something back from analysis, but nothing looked particularly promising. “You really need to page the RDI department. This is getting ridiculous.”

With a tilt of his head, he brought into main focus on the screen a type of diagnostic that only Greywaren, among all the Jaegers of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps, could sport.

_‘Dreamcatcher’ status: charging. Next warping available in: 00.01.03._

“It’s worse than last week,” Maura admitted with an evident frown.

“Well, no shit. Declan really needs to figure it out, a timing like this would have landed our sorry asses in the apocalypse.”

Through the drift, Ronan sympathised with his father’s annoyance. Their best performance during the triple event of five months and nineteen days before had delivered three warps in 39.43 seconds. An average waiting time of 13.143 seconds to do what no one else can do. And yet, it had been an infinity in battle, hammering in Ronan’s ribcage for every _not yet, not yet, not yet,_ he had to count through. More than one minute for a mundane piece of equipment was past the point of dysfunctionality.

“Lynch, everyone is aware, but the additional encryption on Artemus’s files is stranding the team.” She said the name in passing, without breaking business. Every single one they’ve lost in the quest to save a world that already felt doomed would always be remembered, rather than sanitised out of every discussion and into oblivion. 

Niall’s usual complaint was just around the corner — Ronan knew Declan had to try better, just as the two of them manifested the impossible while piloting — but a sudden static crackling in the loudspeaker cut him off from voicing it. The video flickered and cut out in black stripes.

“Sargent, we’re losing the comms,” Ronan called out, pointlessly louder. 

Through the drift, Niall’s skepticism intertwined with a list of diagnostic codes to rattle to the internal AI system of Greywaren. 

All the Jaegers had four different channels of communications with the Shatterdome — satellite, radio, microwave, and infrared — and would default to the next method in hierarchy if one were to fail. _Losing comms_ was not realistic — and yet, one second later, it was suddenly just the two of them and the inherent noise of the enclosed chamber.

“What the fuck is with you and all this acting up today?” Niall uttered, evidently talking to the fully functional, if isolated, Greywaren.

An uneasiness spread at the back of Ronan’s neck, under the tight piloting suit. When he swallowed, it tasted like ozone. 

The display still read, “ _Next warping available in: 00.00.48_ ,” and counting. But Ronan’s skin was prickling — both of their skins were.

“That’s _impossible_ ,” Niall growled. 

A warp was approaching.

The crash that followed crumbled the very ground they stood on. Dust rose first, then fire. All the sensors in Greywaren abruptly lit up in red and orange, flashing too many warnings to follow.

All around them, metallic coils raised from the ground up, taller than the Jaeger itself and thick as high-tension poles. But there wasn’t even the time to look around properly.

They cut through the first hit with a hard push, reacting by sheer instinct. The chainsaw clattered back to life and cut through a metallic surface with a high-pitched whistling, sparks flying through the air. The visibility was terrible, between the muddling effect of darkness and dust and the heat cameras impaired by the blazing flames. 

Greywaren was being steadily, inexorably restricted. 

Even blasting with the left arm cannon only freed them temporarily. With the next hit, the chainsaw broke into pieces.

It was like being tossed into the middle of a very aggressive metal whirlpool dead set on countering their Jaeger’s movements in every possible way. 

The strength of the metal coils was unreal. Jaegers were meant to withstand otherworldly monsters, and yet the alerts in Greywaren blared orange, then red, but the top of the screen still reported an unforgiving: “ _Threat: unknown_ ”.

They were still trying to deploy the last of the ammunition in close contact when the pressure started to increase around the joints of Greywaren’s arm. Ronan gritted his teeth — one look at Niall was sufficient to know they had to brace themselves. 

They breathed in through the drift and did their best to hold the command steady. 

When the Jaeger’s arm gave up and shattered, it felt like their own — flesh and bones and nerves and blood torn to pieces. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t there, but they both cried out.

There was nowhere to go, no weapons left, and no contact with the headquarters. 

_Next warping available in: 00.00.22._

The phantom pain of the lost arm had barely faded when an unbelievable agony spread between their shoulders and necks. 

“ _Protection shell compromised at Level 3. Level 2. Level 1…_ ”

“You’re _fucking kidding me_ — quench neural connection!” Niall barked out, as a metal coil dug its way through their chest. 

Greywaren obliged, but the disembodied voice kept reporting the increasing list of damage.

The invasion remained, whether they felt it on their bodies or not. The coils were still going, unmistakably, for the pilot hutch. 

In the ten years since Ronan had become a pilot, nothing and no one had ever come this close to them, directly, _inside_. 

His mind reeled, twinned with his father. They had foregone partial control with the quenching, but they still fought bodily against the metal tackling them. 

It felt pointless — it was pointless. 

_Next warping available in: 00.00.16._

The alarms were blaring so loudly Ronan almost spaced out against the sound. Thumping after thumping, the coils hammered against the last defences of the very shell of the pilot chamber.

They could try to disengage completely and take an emergency exit towards the deserted island covered in Kaiju remains that awaited them outside. They could — but they wouldn’t. 

No pilot would rather leave their Jaeger behind than fight. 

_Next warping available in: 00.00.11._

Just a few seconds more and they would could bring hell raining down on whatever the fuck this was. Just a few seconds more, and the Lynches will show why Greywaren could withstand the apocalypse. Just a few seconds more.

_Next warping available in: 00.00.07._

The hutch pierced open with a bang, giving way to hot air and dust. It was blinding, suffocating, and deafening. For a moment Ronan thought his eardrums had pierced — it would explain the wave of vertigo that left him disoriented, nauseous. 

He didn’t let the command handles go. No good pilot ever would, control was paramount, Niall said it constantly. And yet his determination was muddled through the high-pitched whistle that filled his brain. 

Bearing down on the piloting harness, Ronan turned around stiffly, eyes watering in the burning heat. He was strangely overwhelmed, even through all the adrenaline of this impossible battle.

Beside him, Niall’s body traced an awkward profile, a metal coil piercing him on his left side and another passing through his chest. 

His father was jerked up, brusquely, like a ragdoll, and his hands slipped away from the handles, offering no resistance. 

“ _Dad!!!_ ”

Before Ronan could extricate himself from the harness to do something — anything — the metal coil flipped brusquely, crashing Niall’s body against the lead-coated walls of the piloting hutch. 

For all the surrounding ruckus, the crunch of bones breaking — his neck, his skull — echoed with sickening clarity. 

The coil retreated abruptly and went to join two others at the side of the inner chamber. MEtal clutching against metal, trying to dismantle the Jaeger more fully than the initial laceration.

Niall fell down almost softly, limbs all in odd angles and blood spreading dark on the hutch floor among the multitude of flashing lights. Even out of the harness, the thin wiring connecting him to the Jaeger — to the drift — was still latched on his suit. 

Ronan stared and stared, in a frozen stillness. 

His throat convulsed, jumping through an increasingly laboured breathing, but it was like having no air — pierced through the chest, pierced through the stomach. Cold spread, unchallenged.

He couldn’t feel anything — not the heat of the fire threatening the hutch, not the deafening noise of Greywaren getting ripped apart, not himself.

The world withered around him.

There was a last spark of colours, almost too bright to be real. Aurora sat on his legs, heavily pregnant; Ronan was taking his first wobbling steps, saying _Dada_ ; endless blueprints in artificial light with Declan beside him; Ronan sweaty and almost passed out but laughing at the light of the first day without a Pacific Rim. But that, too, faded to black. 

There was something, just _something_ , getting uprooted from his brain. Dragged out. 

Slow and inexorable. Then sudden and irreversible, and Ronan was alone.

Ronan screamed and screamed, until he couldn’t see through his tears. 

There was too much empty space, not even the pain could fill it. 

Everything was back in focus — sounds, and heat, and colours — but nothing felt real. He would have sagged down, but the harness didn’t let him.

“Dad!...Dad…”

For the first time in his life no one replied, and the drift was hollow, empty of his father’s presence. 

“ _Warping available,_ ” the reporting voice crackled through the damaged loudspeakers, unprompted. “ _Warping available_.”

His father’s body was grotesque, so devoid of his presence. Ronan couldn’t stop looking, and couldn’t stop sobbing — not that it lifted any heaviness from his chest, but it was wretched and hopeless and thus, somehow, fitting.

“You have to take a warping leap,” someone said, through the banging hits on laminate that kept coming from outside. 

Breaking into Jaeger was more than a struggle, but Greywaren was already broken, now. Fundamentally so. 

“You’re still functional, it’s not broken...yet. You have to take the leap,” someone insisted, even though Ronan hadn’t quite spoken.

“ _Warping available_ ,” the system confirmed. It was almost cruel, for it to be so relentless.

“I can’t.” Ronan hung heavily from the piloting harness, spit and tears running down his face. Everything hurt and there was too much noise, too many conflicting lights. His head rang empty. “I can’t.”

Someone hummed, almost sympathetic. There was a male figure, roughly Ronan’s age, sitting next to Niall’s empty piloting slot. It was difficult to focus him, through the tears, and it made no sense for him to be there, but he unmistakably was. He looked back at Ronan with distress, fair hair pulled back messily and something grubby about his complexion, especially around the right cheekbone. 

“You have to. Your Jaeger won’t hold forever, and they will come for it, and for you, and for your father. You have to.”

The tone of it was so somber Ronan had a hard time doubting it. Somehow, it crystallised his despair, sharp like a diamond blade and leaving cuts from the inside out. He blinked away from the stranger and back to his father. The concept of _they_ was elusive and yet worthy of an obsession, and it blazed in Ronan’s mind, untamed by Niall’s ruthlessness. At the same time, it was impossible to concentrate on it now, disoriented by the chaos in and out of the hutch. 

Greywaren was the most perfect of his father’s creations. And no Lynch would ever leave a man behind in the field — dead or alive.

He gritted his teeth and stood up with more purpose, adjusting his stance on the stepping platform and digging his fingers to the very bottom of the handles. 

There was nothing in this world that was better known to Ronan than the drills of piloting a Jaeger. And yet when he pushed through, just to reassess his stance, for the first time in his life the Jaeger _pushed back_. 

He screamed, but he almost didn’t hear himself, blinded by a lacerating pain that sliced through his brain. It started from all the places his father had just left barren, bloody — scarred for life — and it _spread_.

There was a reason piloting a Jaeger alone was deemed as an impossible feat.

“ _Warping available_ ,” insisted Greywaren, stuttering like a radio out of frequency, as if it hadn’t just got a taste of Ronan alone and spit him out whole.

It was difficult to breathe, even more so through the dust and the thin air that was left from the fire. Among all the stink, Ronan was sure he could smell the blood, his father’s blood. He was so alone.

“It’s like a skateboard,” the stranger said, in plain contrast with the situation. “You just need a bit of a kick.”

Ronan watched him get up as if everything was very far away. It was difficult to focus on anything but the pain, but it was also difficult to not let that same anguish diffuse into a blur.

After so many years of training he was going into shock. 

“What are you doing?” Ronan rasped out, defensively outraged by seeing this stranger get into the piloting slot beside his own. The cables that connected to the drift were still uselessly stretched towards the horrifically empty vessel that had been Ronan’s father. 

“Helping you out.” The stranger didn’t bother with harness, or tuning, or any procedure a sensible pilot would have run through. “Come on, Ronan.”

They both dug in the commands again, a reflexive synch.

Ronan didn’t know how Noah found out his name. But the reverse was true as well, he realised belatedly.

He didn’t leave himself the time to be skittish, or hesitant. No one piloted by hesitations. He bore down again, with a single-minded focus that contrasted with the crushing pressure on his sternum.

It wasn’t easier, in itself, and at the same time it was. 

There was a piercing whistle in his ears, a rising pressure at the back of his throat, and yet it was manageable not to get crushed by it. 

It was nothing like piloting with his father — what had been an effort akin to running the last kilometer of a marathon was now a desperate dash to not get run over by a steamroller. He couldn’t feel Noah, not really, which was disorienting — it felt like a trap, just Ronan and his own brain facing the enormity of the Jaeger. 

He angled his body in the commands and Greywaren woke up from its laxness in the grip of the metal coils. It gave a jerk, straightening. Responding. 

Noah whistled in appreciation, good-natured and free from any derision. The salt of dried tears tightened Ronan’s skin, cracking his lips bloody, but he grinned without joy. 

There would be no victory today, but no Lynch should ever go down without fighting back.

“Pilot override,” Ronan declared, through the clench of his own teeth. “Full power output to Dreamcatcher.” 

The screens were too damaged to show anything more than an impression of status report — a blinking yellow dot, checking Ronan’s biosignature to validate the override. The alerts gradually stopped flashing, even the diagnostic system was quenched to maximise the energy towards the warping. There was a single sound following, deep like a stone dropping in a pond, and Ronan knew they were ready to go. 

“Lock on Hangar 002319.” It was almost a whisper, the numbering provided like smooth suggestion from something stranger to his own mind. Someone. Noah.

The pressure was rising somewhere behind Ronan’s eyelids, against his temples, but he gave himself up to the charged shivering of this incoming thunder.

He stayed as still as possible, while the cacophony of the Greywaren getting demolished by the coils continued mercilessly. He canted on the tip of his toes, working them until they strained. It hurt and it didn’t matter. There was no system left to tell him that the trajectory was set, that the charging was completed, but Ronan knew — he just knew. 

“Wow,” Noah whispered, with an awe that Ronan hadn’t felt since he was fifteen and every twist of Greywaren was full of marvel. 

Everything echoed empty, now, but he stared forward, facing the emptiness.

He took the warping leap.

His vision tunneled into nothingness. The noise of the coils getting snatched violently by Greywaren and then gone is a second, overcome by the breaking of the sound barrier for an acceleration of thousands kilometers per hour.

It was more difficult than usual, with a damaged Jaeger, a damaged hutch, a damaged drift.

They didn’t make it to the Hangar. Greywaren toppled overed gracelessly when they touched ground on one of the restricted area around the Hong Kong Shatterdome, operative Headquarter of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps. 

Even with the harness of the piloting pods, everything hurt as if Ronan had just broken half of his body and bruised the rest. He coughed wetly, and that alone suggested that the impact hadn’t knocked him out. Something darker and thicker than blood dripped at his feet on the piloting stage, sliding off from his mouth, and nostrils — maybe eyes, ears. 

And yet Ronan felt nothing, nothing _really_. 

Nothing in comparison to seeing his father — his father’s corpse — now smashed against the far wall of the damaged hutch, torn off the drift connectors and broken further into pieces.

It didn’t matter. Niall would never use those limbs again.

It mattered, enough to make Ronan violently sick, in spite of all the rest.

Noah was nowhere to be seen anymore. The harness hung empty and the whole hutch was almost dark, drained of any power just to catapult them to safety. 

A slither of sunlight came through from the crack left by the coil that had broken through and slaughtered Niall. Dawn had come, to mark another day as if nothing has even happened — but dawn hadn’t cared for the day they cancelled the apocalypse, even. 

Ronan stayed there a long time, not even hearing the silence. 

This wasn’t peace.

When he bore down again on the handles and the stage, there was only pain — no thoughts, no solace, no compromise. It was fitting, more fitting than the quiet of the beach where he had landed.

The Greywaren got up, slow and uncoordinated by the damages on his hardware, the damages on his pilot. Even the reporting voice was silent when Ronan took a step, and then another, and then other twenty, and then a hundred.

He was so alone.

There was no need to make it to the actual gates of the base. They found him before, rushing towards him in armoured vehicles and technical gear.

Ronan stopped walking, convulsing on with another fit of gross coughing. 

In every story worth telling, a hero would rise to the challenge of monsters and win the battle to save the world. No one had ever bothered to tell Ronan about the fate of a hero in a world that had overcome the edge of disaster. 

But now he was over that edge.

The answer seemed to be: _agony_.

  
  
  


[[ Art inspired by this chapter was provided by Is [(spaceykiddo)](https://thenightfury.co.vu/): [Come find it over here!](https://thenightfury.co.vu/post/184660025778/first-piece-of-many-more-to-come-inspired-by-the)]]  
  



	2. Chapter 1

  
  
  


Pilots weren’t to be buried. They were meant to burn and have their ashes dispersed in the wind, to be carried forward without anything to hold them back.

Niall Lynch was no exception to this pattern, Irish Catholic roots notwithstanding. 

From his spot at the established safety distance from the furnace, Gansey knew this was both a revered tradition and a practicality. Pilots were branded by the drift, burying them was akin to purposefully releasing a pollutant in the environment at best, encouraging further exhumation and other questionable pursuits at worse. 

Fire was better. Clean, unforgiving, an echo of the burial of great warriors. 

Behind his shoulders, the entire hall was packed of people — their people. They would have to hold a public ceremony for the tossing of the ashes, later, one packed with diplomats, politicians, dignitaries, all sort of strangers providing the performance of a homage to Lieutenant General Lynch, the hero. But the fire was just for the ranks of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps, from the technical ensigns up, and some even flew from the other Shatterdomes to the headquarters to pay their respects. 

On everyone’s faces Gansey could sense the reflections of his own thoughts: they should have been done with this. Lieutenant General Poldma — Persephone — should have had the bittersweet honour of being the last of the losses; her ashes flew over a Pacific that would never again harbour monsters, over a safe world.

That hadn’t been the case and the morale was precarious. It had been since the shock of Ronan returning to base, piloting a severely damaged Greywaren, alone. 

Gansey had been on the command bridge that night, trying to make himself useful. He knew firsthand that whatever they might have expected from their top Jaeger going off-comm it didn’t include barely recovering it, losing Niall, getting Ronan back in a shell-shocked state — oozing black from his nostrils, coughing it out, and yet somehow still piloting. He had even given a valiant attempt at reporting back, but no amount of training made the substance of his recollection less fragmented. Gansey was still unsure whether it was the trauma’s fault, or if it was just the maddening way things actually rolled out that day. The more days passed, the more everyone was abandoning the first interpretation and leaning towards the second.

He stared at the floor, deeply aware of the blinding light of the furnace, burning and burning.

Ronan was nowhere to be seen. Not here with the high ranks he belonged to, not anywhere. Any Colonel deserting an event like this would have been challenged for the insubordination but no one would dare bringing it up in this case.

_Death on the drift_ , everyone still murmured. 

The horror of it surpassed the marvel of Ronan being able to sustain a warping leap at full power on his own. Bringing down a pilot would often be equivalent to annihilating the team, and even Persephone had detached from the drift to prevent Calla and Maura shouldering the weight of her death, down in the bottom of the Ocean, while the battle against the apocalypse wound down towards the end. 

Gansey had really thought the days of their battles were over, that whoever had been spared by the ten-year war would be safe for the foreseeable feature.

Hundreds of people behind him were stuck in that organic type of silence that filled even the most respectful of the crowds. The furnace was loud, ticking, the cooling elements for the circuits clattering at odd times. 

His head was hurting.

It was an annoyingly common occurrence in the last months — almost four months now. 

Beside him, Helen stood in one composed line from polished boots to the rigid collar of her high uniform, her gaze respectfully tilted towards the floor. The only fault in her posture was her left arm, a cold and mostly unresponsive prosthetic that occasionally brushed Gansey’s hand. The scars that came all the way up to the side of her face were mostly healed, now, and Helen almost showcased them, with an asymmetric undercut that she had done with Ronan’s clipper and Calla’s help, after the final mission. The fact that her most vulnerable side was pressed against Gansey — to guard, even without acknowledging it — filled him with a weird self-consciousness. 

What would have been like, to lose her? 

He came so close, the pain that cursed through the drift was so fresh — a tendril connecting them, so steady and yet so feeble. He had felt it stretching, thinner and thinner, while they desperately tried to hold the line with Fox, for Greywaren to warp their bomb all the way in the rim. It hadn’t severed, but it had been so _close_.

“Dick,” Helen said, and Gansey snapped back into attention.

Only seconds before, they had been waiting for the cremation to be over and for Mother — General Gansey — to call an end to the gathering. But now the crowd that had stood with them was dispersing in the strict fashion of a military order, and Gansey didn’t remember the closing.

It could have been a bit more than seconds. Gansey must have spaced out.

“Yes, right,” he said, pointlessly.

Helen shoot him a look that conveyed just how little persuaded by the act she was. “No, wrong,” she echoed, not unkindly. “Why don’t you go to Ronan, Dick?”

He really wanted to rub at his temples, so of course he absolutely shouldn’t. “I’ll go after the dispersion of the ashes. You said even Taldin from the U.N. was coming…”

“He is, and I’ll handle it, and Mum and Declan will be there. Even Calla is going to sit this one out, so just go, the field will look even.”

_You don’t look good_ , it was the undertone, even though unspoken. He wasn’t feeling good, so that was no wonder. But _not good_ was a bad match for diplomats, politicians, stakeholder — assorted entitled money-providing assholes. 

“Fine,” Gansey resolved, with a half-sigh. He glanced at the furnace, the stage with the ashes currently cooling down somewhere far from sight. He didn’t know if he was glad for it, or bitter. “Just…”

Helen looked at him, so steady, so unbreakable even while Gansey seemed to trip over each of his steps. “It’s just ashes. We’re pilots, we can always find each other in the drift.”

“Always,” Gansey echoed, even though his chest hurt. 

He watched them go in the same way he always had done, when he was too young and inexperienced to be part of that ordered arrangement — Maura, Calla, and Mother; Helen, Declan and Father this time. It was weirdly infantilising, and at the same time tainted with guilt. 

Helen would likely never pilot again. She had always trained with four of her limbs and even changing the settings of the Jaeger to cope with the absence of an arm will require a retraining that might not have the time, or reason, to happen. Calla and Maura were a complicated issue — in theory fit for duty, in practice engaged in a stubborn back and forth with the other high ranks about how it was not meant to be anymore. Declan had never been a pilot. And Gansey, in his own right, might not able to do this anymore, as if he had left the required clarity of his mind next to the Pacific Rim and then detonated it.

The final mission — codename _Doomsday_ — had been true to its name. 

They would always find each other in the drift. But what if there was no drift in their future?

More than a century before William Butler Yeats had written, “ _Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world._ ” 

Unbearably fond of the poet’s Irish origins, Niall Lynch had quoted him often enough in Gansey’s early teenage years — spent in simulation and tactical training — that the lines would never abandon him. So, inevitably, every time he walked the way towards the pilots’ quarters, in the very core of the Shatterdome, Gansey appreciated the fact that they were the centre — they had to hold, in whichever way they could, in order not to lose the battle and ruin the chances of a whole war. 

The chips built into his military dog tags synched with the entrance of his room, and the sliding door retreated into the wall to let Gansey inside. He didn’t stay long, even though his bed was still outrageously unmade and the temptation to just collapse in it was strong. Instead, he tossed the jacket of his high uniform on the mattress and went off to Ronan’s room, two steps away in the same corridor.

His knocking clattered on the steel-lined door, and partially on his temples are well — still trapped in a pressing grip. Waiting did him no good, and there was only the low sound of static electricity running through the highly weaponized base.

“Ronan,” Gansey called, with another useless banging. 

On a different occasion, he might have been worried that Ronan wasn’t actually there — that he had gone onto the roof, or among civilians, or was using the equipment in a questionable way. But not on the day of Niall’s service, when he could have all too easily encountered people ready to give him his condolences, or generally to remind him of what was going on. 

Sighing at the barren ceiling, he pushed himself away from one door and walked to the next one over. 

In every base they had ever occupied, all the pilots were clustered around the same zone, but also every piloting team would have adjacent rooms. For almost ten years now, Helen had been on the other side of a thin wall — sometimes not even that, especially after the first battles when it had been so difficult to disentangle from the drift and her absence had made Gansey antsy. In the same way, Gansey stared at the tag — “LTG Lynch - PPDCPLT0621003” — before knocking again.

When there was still no reply, Gansey had to opt for the type of sincerity he wholeheartedly despised. 

“Ronan, would you open this door? The lighting of the corridor is giving me a headache.”

It wasn’t a full truth, as he already had one, but not even a blatant lie, as he could feel it worsening. 

The door opened with a _blip_. 

“Get the fuck in, you’re such a pain in the ass.”

Niall’s room was the primary exhibition of the Lynch art of clutter — passed over from Niall to Ronan as the rightful heir, disdained by Declan who made minimalism into a religion. Ronan sat on the floor, surrounded by papers, blueprints, and stray pieces of unknown equipment — like another one of Niall’s possessions, unaware that the rightful owner would not walk through these doors again. 

The inherent burden of having a conscience, unlike everything else in the room, was evident in Ronan’s eyes, sunken in the purple mark of sleeplessness, his face full of shadows from his unshaved stubble in the low lighting of the room. 

There were three empty cans of beer beside him, crushed in the middle by a fist. It inevitably raised the question on how he had gotten hold of them, considering that alcohol and drugs not provided specifically by the med bay were categorically banned in every Shatterdome — on the ground that it was all too easy to drive people trapped in a decade-long fight against the apocalypse towards addictions. Conversely, a quick glance confirmed that the three bottles of Connemara Peated Single Malt — marking yet another Niall-exception to every possible rule — were still untouched. 

“I know I am,” Gansey replied, out of beat in the exchange. He had stood silent, distracted by too many details in the room, and that was one of the several reasons _pain in the ass_ excellently summarised his past few months. 

Navigating gingerly through the mess on the floor, he went to sit on the edge of the mattress, right next to where Ronan was resting his back. 

“How is your head?” Ronan murmured, and maybe it was a good sign if the half-assed guilt-trip elicit some reaction aside of opening the door. 

“A bit better, now,” Gansey admitted. The shadows were always more comfortable. “I still space out, it’s difficult sometimes to keep the details in the right order. If I space out on you, do...I don’t know...kick me in the shins?”

“I would kick you in the shins ‘cause you’re breathing funny, aim higher.”

Gansey huffed amusedly, but it was difficult to laugh while witnessing the dulled edge of Ronan’s sharpness. It was difficult to sustain a smooth dialogue, also, as everything tended more naturally to fall into a heavy silence than into an uplifting prep talk. 

The only light in the room was the lamp on the desk, shining partially against the wall, partially on the piles of notebooks, tablets, and post-it covered boards. Niall Lynch’s personality shone throughout the space, mingled with the lingering smell of that shaving cream he insisted on getting shipped from Ireland. In exchange, last week, they had shipped the youngest brother, Matthew, back to Aurora Lynch, on the grounds that he would do a better job trying to check on the woman than he would do as a logistic support in the Shatterdome. 

The Lynch family had been, together with the Ganseys, among the founding members of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps — shaping them, donating their vision, pouring money into it, and making victory possible. That still didn’t explain how they could possibly be so ill-equipped for loss. 

Not that Gansey himself was in the position to judge, tormented as he was by thoughts of what would be of their families now that they had cracked open after the finishing line. 

“I don’t want them to take these things,” Ronan admitted, out of nowhere. “If I break some noses over it, maybe you can negotiate against the insubordination, or whatever the fuck.”

Gansey followed his gaze towards some of the papers that covered the wall. Unlike the rest of the piloting team, there weren’t any pictures or hobbies. Niall’s outside interests were the Jaegers; the war had been his full time occupation, and it showed. But underneath the surface there was still something deeply personal: the final design of what had been Ronan’s first piloting suit, at fifteen years old; a long list of numbers and some graphs with a marker reading “17 Dec 2015” that was clearly — at least to a fellow pilot like Gansey — the printout of the stats of Ronan and Niall first successful neural handshake. 

“No one will try to repossess _Niall Lynch’s_ belongings.” Gansey answered, with all seriousness. There were certain steps of the hierarchy that had never been up for discussion, and never would be. The Old Guard of the Corps occupied each of those special cases. “But sure, that’s fine. I can always break some noses with you, and we keep one another company in isolation.” 

Ronan sagged more heavily against the floor, his nape following the hard curve of the edge of the mattress, but didn’t really seem comforted. He hadn’t told Gansey to fuck all the way off, yet, though — equally a good thing and a terrible sign.

“Declan thinks I’m crazy,” Ronan rumbled out, after another stretch of silence. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

In the ten years Gansey had known the Lynch brothers, Declan and Ronan never had a stellar relationship — yet another echo of the fact that where Niall led, Ronan followed, whilst Niall and his firstborn son matched in ingenuity but not in personality. However, sibling rivalry had little to do with this specific conflict, and it was difficult to fault Declan for finding drift-induced delirium more plausible than Ronan’s recollection.

“I think there is a bit of a heavy mix...but!” He rushed, before Ronan could send him flying. “But you’ve always been lucid in battle. I don’t think you’re crazy, I just...I don’t think I _understand_.”

“Fuck you,” Ronan bit out, reflexively. “There was someone in the hutch. Someone was there with me.”

“Someone,” Gansey repeated slowly. The knowledge seemed preposterous, you didn’t just stumble upon people in a Jaeger. 

“Another pilot. That’s why I was able to do something, he stabilised the drift...or something…”

Gansey run a hand through his hair, combing it out of the strict order it sported during the ceremony. “I’m confused. So you drifted with them? You should know more than a _someone_ , if you did.”

Ronan and Gansey weren’t exactly drift compatible — more like _drift complementary_ , as Persephone had defined them so many years ago. They could tune two drifts, but they wouldn’t have optimal stats in a Jaeger together. And yet, when they were very young and close to achieving pilot status, they had drifted sometimes. Ronan knew the names of all of the stuffed animals Gansey had owned as a kid, and Gansey knew the top five comfort rituals for when Ronan got antsy, from food to music to games. You couldn’t drift and end with vagueness, not even for a one-off.

“I...it’s strange, okay, I know it’s strange.” Ronan fidgeted, avoiding Gansey’s gaze. “I have a name. And nothing else. He brought nothing in the drift.”

That hardly computed, but there was no point in stating that, so instead Gansey said, “Then give me the name. If he’s anywhere, with a little patience, we’ll find him.”

A displeased grunt conveyed Ronan’s opinion on _patience_ perfectly. “You’re very good at finding things.”

Gansey smiled, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “That I am.”

“Noah Czerny.”

“And you spell that how?”

Ronan had a moment of hesitation, a deep burrowing of his eyebrows. Recalling the drift was difficult, at times. In this case, given how he stiffened, it was more than that. “C-Z-E-R-N-Y.”

“Noted.” Gansey confirmed.

More silence followed, for long enough that Gansey reshuffled and leaned against the frame at the foot of the bed without a word being spoken. If they had been in Ronan’s room he would have contemplated laying down, but you just didn’t rest on a dead man’s bed.

“If we find him, do you think we’ll find _them_?”

“...Define them.”

“He said — Noah...when he was trying to get me to move...he said that _they_ were coming for me and Greywaren,” Ronan brought his knees closer to his chest, in an uncharacteristic breaking of posture. “So maybe there is a _them_.”

A _them_ that had found the team, killed Niall, damaged Greywaren,and broke the hard-earned sense of security. Ronan wasn’t the first to whisper in search of a _who_ — because threats and deaths must come from somewhere, even with a closed Pacific Rim. It made more sense than stray tech malfunctioning, even more so given the herculean task of taking down a Jaeger. 

“Then even better,” Gansey said, stern. “We find this Noah, we find them, and we _move_.”

There was no mistaking Gansey’s meaning. Ronan gave a very tentative smile, fractured and at the same time vaguely maniac at the idea of crushing whoever brought this upon them. He had always worked better with a war to fight — Gansey would gladly help orchestrating it if it meant they could really get peace at some point. 

“I say we should drink that.” Gansey tilted his head towards the bottle of irish whiskey.

Ronan eyed him sideways. “I thought you were against drinking.”

“We’re all against drinking — we are!” Gansey insisted, catching Ronan disbelieving expression. “It’s just...it’s right as it is, we should. It’s an exception.”

“Like after Doomsday?” Ronan mocked, but made to get up and recover the table. “You’re starting to have an awful lot of exceptions, _Dick_.”

Gansey grimaced against the use of the Helen-exclusive nickname for him, which landed with the right angle of guilt. He supposed he deserved it, considering his entrance. 

“Yes, you’re a terrible influence. Just pour it.” 

Ronan uncapped the whiskey and took a gulp directly from the bottle, staying carefully still for a moment before passing it over. Gansey stared at the year of production on the label. His intellectual alcohol knowledge told him that this kind of drink that was supposed to be set to rest, possibly with some lukewarm water to the side, then enjoyed with its layered smells and flavours. He let the thought settle, and proceeded to swallow it down with an abundant sip. The cough that followed was barely contained — this was much worse than Maura and Calla’s phenomenal experimentations with vodka — and even his nose ignited with it. 

“I’m a terrible influence and you’re such a pussy,” Ronan mocked, even with a slight twist in his words that was quite telling of a throat on fire. He took the bottle back and sat by Gansey rather than at his feet. 

It was as intimate as training together — just as right, in all this unfixable wrong. 

They didn’t speak of what was missing.

Gansey remembered how Ronan’s eyes had shone bright with grief when Persephone’s absence finally paired with enough vodka. This time it was different. Everything remained bottled within an almost-unblinking Ronan, but Ronan’s left hand grasped on the Niall’s bedding, tighter and tighter, with the same steadiness reserved to the piloting handles. 

There was nothing to keep close, and safe, by sheer force of will. Certainly not in Niall’s room.

However, in the whiskey-fuelled fuzziness, Gansey stared at Ronan’s profile and decided that they had lost enough. 

He had kept the world safe from the apocalypse. Now he could, and would, keep everything he held dear away from the edge of destruction. 

Do or _just do_. And hold the centre.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Any amount of burning resolution in the world was susceptible to be bursted like a toddler’s soap bubble. 

In this case, the first hit came from the Technical team. Reports escalated all the way to the desk Declan occupied as head of the RDI — Research, Development and Implementation — painting the full picture of the three Mark-III Jaegers’ status. 

In short, none of them were functional at the moment. Greywaren had theoretically withstood the least damage but being the only warping Jaeger in existence came with the burden of painstaking maintenance — and, in this specific case, a whole new arm compliant with warping specifications. Fox was almost structurally sound but with serious core instabilities. Glendower had multiple structural faults, interconnected in ways that were difficult to discern, and while the core had proven structurally sound to several tests, the drift-interface issue had been elevated to a conundrum by the teams. The fact that none of the Jaegers had a piloting team ready to deploy only added fuel to the fire. 

The second hit came through the same people that Helen said had looked very crestfallen at Niall’s funeral. In retrospect, it was almost a surprise that they had let three days pass — maybe on the misplaced feeling that Lieutenant General Lynch was the type of man that could come back even from cremation — before bringing up the unbeatable argument of _money_.

“What does it mean we don’t have funding to fix all of the Jaegers?!” Gansey came very close to snapping during the monthly business-like family dinner with Mother, Father and Helen.

Astrid Gansey — General of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps and former Senator of the United States — gave him the withering look that was the universal prompt to control his emotions in front of the vegetables. Gansey, who didn’t properly remember a life without a degree of food rationing, didn’t quite grasp the feeling but still felt urged to comply.

“It means exactly what I said. We had been having some very long conversations, I’m afraid we reached a stalemate.”

“How do they expect us to fix the last residues of the Rim without Jaegers?” Helen pointed out — not _protested_ , the difference was important.

“Oh, they will fix something — using the older Marks still operational in the other Shatterdomes is already proving to be a tentative arrangement. But they won’t fix _everything_.” Richard Gansey, the Second, explained, carefully cutting a carrot.

“We’re not facing the apocalypse anymore, my dears,” Astrid said, with half a sigh. “You all did such an amazing job, but we lost leverage for several six-digit outlines.”

Gansey counted up to five, and then three more, before replying. “I’m not sure what we could be facing now, exactly because of what happened even _without_ the Kaijus.”

A pointed silence spread to the table, and no restraint in the world would ever make Gansey completely blind on the fact that his parents cared that they had lost Niall. After all, when this had all begun, they had put in the money and the political traction but Niall and put in the mad creative genius and made the impossible possible. They had been a good team — and having lost Persephone and Artemus had already struck the founding pillars of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps where it _hurt_. 

“We’re not new to compromises,” Gansey II said, refilling all the glasses of water. “It is important that things work swiftly, then you can back your requests with results.”

“The PPDC are not exactly a for-profit organisation, and to be completely frank in reiterating, we _did_ save the world. I’m not sure you get much higher in credentials,” Helen said. She was much better at keeping every ounce of her tone crisp and articulated — _assertive, not contrary_ , as Mother loved to highlight — so there was no reproach for her.

While speaking, Helen had moved the knife towards Gansey, seated beside her. He didn’t need more clues to pick it up and help Helen cut the meat while she held it still with the fork. Her current prosthetic was good for bulky movements, but not optimised for finery. Still, it was better than nothing, especially to keep the nerve endings alive and responsive at the shoulder.

When he looked up, their parents were looking at them, and Gansey had the net impression that they weren’t simply amazed by the display of perfect synch as a civilian would have been. There was a somber feeling to it, similar to the one that bounced between them every time they passed a particular milestone in this war.

Astrid let out the thinnest of sighs. “We did, but when asked to do assessments we need to consider how much equipment we would leave on idle after a hypothetical end of repairs.”

This was the closest Mother would come to directly approach Problem Number 2 — the piloting teams. She would would always expect people to pick up the cues without the inelegance of having to spell out the whole train of thought. Gansey put down the knife, but didn’t find an immediate rebuttal.

“Declan’s project for enhancing the performance of your prosthetic got cleared, however,” Father added. 

Helen’s eyebrow shot up. “Is this rerouting funding from the Jaeger program?”

“The Jaeger program is already facing a gradual decommission, I remind you, but no. It’s not.” Mother piped in, going back to clear her plate. “It’s foreseen to be a reapplicable and scalable technology, Declan actually plans on using some of the insights from the Jaegers to implement it…”

“He told me,” Helen interjected, gracefully but firmly.

“Then you know it could be the first step into transferring the outcomes of the program into a peaceful society. No, it’s not rerouting any funding, and if anything it will grant us more freedom if successful.”

Astrid’s forehead sported a vague crease that seemed to ask, _satisfied?_. Helen nodded, composedly. 

“So what are the odds, at the moment, for this… _compromise_?” Gansey dared.

Another sigh, this time from Father. “We have all the teams going over the possible assessments, with concurrent requirements of price and TTC. Most likely, Greywaren will get fixed — warping technology and all — but I can’t promise you two that Glendower will be second in priority. We might need to get a bit creative.”

Helen did the very risky move of twirling the fork between two fingers, as she often did if she was thinking, if she wanted to get on their Mother’s manner-nerves, or a combination of the two. “I don’t think anyone here is suggesting an emotional approach. But who will pilot with Ronan, with a newly functional Glendower?”

The stiff silence that followed was like a fifth guest at the table. 

“Declan is considering going through some drifting tests himself. And of course, Dick, you’re currently the most experienced pilot on the base, I’m sure it will come in handy.”

His mother didn’t even have to finish talking for Gansey to know that this was, as Ronan would call it, a _third degree bullshit_. Likewise, it wasn’t necessary to look at Helen to know they were — as always — on the same page.

It was only later, leaning on the connecting doorway between their adjoining rooms, that Gansey confessed.

“I can’t pilot Greywaren.”

Helen moved perfunctorily around the room, getting ready for bed in a routine that took her three times as long now that it involved taking her prosthetic arm off midway through. Gansey would never offer to do everything in her place — but he would be available for her to ask, or she could just stay still long enough that he would pitch in to help. He did it plenty, in the first month after Doomsday, with no more monster-spawning Rims in the Pacific Ocean. 

“Well, if it’s of any consolation, neither can Declan.” Helen huffed slightly, but didn’t offer more detailed thoughts on the very fact that Declan had offered. “Do you have any feeling on whether Ronan will even want to pilot again?”

Gansey, barefooted and in his own pyjamas, combed a hand through this hair. “I think he wants to, but I also think he hasn’t considered the fact that he will need a copilot to do so. Do you follow?”

Helen hummed, as usual deferring to Gansey’s authority in matters of Ronan. She and Ronan had never clicked particularly well — possibly because Helen was closer to Declan’s age and Ronan didn’t want to cross any more wires with his brother than was strictly necessary. But they had a sort of subtle mutual respect, which said in Ronan’s words meant that he regarded Helen as _a bit of a badass_. It was plenty good for Gansey, even more so in the Shatterdome, which harboured a collection of relationships in delicate equilibrium.

“I also notice the elegance of Mum and Dad elevating you to the _most experienced pilot_ ,” Helen smirked thinly. “No offence, of course, but we’re basically saying that they didn’t manage to nudge Maura and Calla into piloting.”

“Yeah, I know.” Gansey admitted. 

It wasn’t for lack of trying, that much was sure, but Gansey was stuck with the feeling that this resolve was what had kept Maura and Calla so _functional_ after the fallout. They would never pilot again, and they could deal with Persephone being gone without having to chase her in the drift. Gansey would never had considered this train of thought before seeing Ronan in the thorns of his peculiar grief towards Niall — he wasn’t sure, personally, if Ronan’s willingness to pilot had more to do with the promise of vengeance or the promise of having an echo of his father back.

“And you, Dick?” Helen asked, suddenly, coming to rest her good shoulder against the other side of the doorframe. She looked exactly the same as she had always done, and yet inevitably changed by their war. “Will you pilot again, even without me?”

Gansey averted his gaze. “You know I’m not fully positive I’d make a good pilot to begin with...as I am now, I mean...do you?”

It was a difficult admission with everyone, even with Helen, who had walked him through the worst of his confusions, who would keep him from sleepwalking and plant him back on track when he lost it. 

And yet, Helen just did a noncommittal movement with her head. “Don’t mind the confusion. Would you pilot again, given the possibility?”

The answer was on his lips before he could second-guess it. “I would.”

The moment he was done saying that, Gansey hoped with all of himself Helen wouldn’t ask for a follow-up. No _why_ s, no _but_ s, no further explanations. He didn’t fully want to admit that he would pilot again because the thought of being _done with it_ was unbearable. 

“Okay, then Mom and Dad are right. You’re our best chance.” Helen smiled, a little knowing, as if perfectly aware that their parents approval wasn’t the full extent of the point. “The scatterbrain thing will be manageable.”

Gansey let his eyes wander in his sister’s room, free of the Lynch clutter and sporting some carefully-curated interests. Shoes, aviation, and some obscure Chinese poetry. Carefully arranged pictures, too. Gansey could see himself growing going from top to bottom of the wall above her drawers, from childhood pictures in a house in Virginia that he barely remembered, to his first PPDC uniform at ten years old, to a candid picture in which he and Helen, in full piloting gear, were sitting on the railing of the walking bridge, laughing at each other with Glendower in the background. 

Everything they had was unrepeatable.

“Will it?” Gansey murmured, trying to not sound bitter with skepticism.

Even without looking at her, the huff that followed was telling of Helen rolling her eyes. “Of course it will, we’re not in the business of _failing_ , here. Are we?” The fierceness of her tone got Gansey to turn around, but when their eyes met her smile was a bit more gentle. “And I’ve been in your head, Dick. The scatterbrain is your trademark.”

“I have excellent tactical scores and you know that!” Gansey protested, following an old argument.

“Which has nothing to do with the fact that your train of thought runs on cocaine. I really think we gave it a little _too much_ cocaine, with that thing in the Ocean…” she trailed off and then waved her hand, pushing him to retreat to his own room. “Basically, we’ll make it better. Now go to sleep.”

Gansey found himself smiling while scuttering off. They didn’t bid each other goodnight in any form, and the connecting door between them remained open with no questions asked. 

In bed, it was a struggle to imagine what solution would manifest, save from the fact that trying to drift with Ronan with the both of them in a precarious state was a terrible idea that only someone who had never really _piloted_ could possibly contemplate.

But he trusted Helen — a significant part of his life was built on _trusting Helen_ — so he found himself somehow confident that a breakthrough was close.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Two weeks later, Hangar 00864 was in complete lock-down and the entirety of the technical workforce of the Shatterdome, plus some guests called specifically from outside the headquarter, had been co-opted for _Operation Collision_. True to the codename, Fox and Glendower stood face to face to each other, secured into the massive steel frames.

From the other side of a ten-centimeter-thick reinforced window, Gansey stared at the flashing lights, sparks, and moving equipment, coordinated by experts in protective gears. This was meant to be the last time he would ever get to see the two Jaegers as they were. 

“Having regrets?” 

When he turned around, Maura was entering the observation room to come and stand beside him. In plain contrast to him, she didn’t wear the uniform of the piloting team, even though her grades were not compatible with the pure Commanding Bridge attire she sported. He went back to look at the hangar. 

“I told Helen that I wanted to see this through. I suppose I’m seeing this through?”

He didn’t trust the interrogative upturn of his own words, especially not when Maura was listening. The slow lifting of her eyebrows at the corner of his eyes dissipated any hope that he hadn’t been caught. 

“Richard Gansey III,” Maura mused, and Gansey stilled, uncertain if he was about to get scolded or offered some comfort. “All grown up, enough to wonder about choices and consequences”

In the hangar, pulleys and outright freight hoists were dismantling the outer protective shells of the two Jaegers and moving the components, damaged or not, out of the way. It had the weird aftertaste of a passing of a baton, with Maura serene about letting go and Gansey unspeakably nervous about grabbing it. 

“Is that how it feels? When a decision you take sets a whole machine into motion?” Gansey asked, in a low voice, suddenly conscious of all the times in his life when their Generals and Lieutenant Generals provided an order and watched them all following through. 

Maura hummed, crossing her arms in front of the layered window. “Maybe. Maybe not. I won’t sell you facts that I don’t have, a month ago I thought we were finished with this, and then I lost comms with Lynch. So I won’t tell you that no, young man, back in the days we were bargaining with the apocalypse...because I don’t know what is starting now.”

Gansey frowned, deepily. “You’re talking as if you will take no part in it.”

“Did I miss the notice of my honourable discharge?” Maura brushed off sudden spark of Gansey’s anxiety, smoothly. “I won’t be out there with you again, though, so in some ways I will take no part in it.” 

“I want to be out there again, but I didn’t want to destroy Fox in the process. I’m sorry.” 

It would take hours, possibly days, for the teams to reach the Jaegers’ cores and slowly start to disengage them. A long, complicated, and risky procedure, in which Gansey didn’t have the health hazard authorisation or the technical clearance to partake directly. Without its core, a Jaeger was little more than a shell of futuristic mechanical engineering: it could be made to work, with enough provided energy, but it could not sustain a drift, it could not be piloted. And yet every shell was usually deemed unique to its core. 

Gansey was looking now, but he was not sure he could get himself to follow what would be the last step of this monumental work: take Glendower’s core, and transfer it to Fox’s shell. 

The net result was expected to be a new, perfectly functional last generation Jaeger, with limited cost of repairing. The majority of the funding was for this preliminary dismantling process, and, later on, for the fine tuning of the new drift circuit. Whatever would come out, however, would not be Glendower, nor would it be Fox. It was almost a quirk, but for a pilot like Gansey, the difference was _everything_. 

“Don’t be dramatic, you didn’t destroy anything,” Maura scolded him again, with a little nudge of her shoulder against Gansey’s arm. “Fox served its time...all the honour, all the pleasure, but Persephone is gone.” 

Yet another silence, of the poignant type that tended to appear at the Shatterdome, the type that couldn’t be filled with words. Fox had been extraordinary; a piloting trio was a drift-compatibility wonder, and it was perfectly logical for a wonder not to be reproducible. And yet, using Fox’s shell meant that the new Jaeger would have a triple-pilot system.

Gansey mulled over several iterations of the same concept, eyes to the floor, before asking, “How is it? Piloting with two more people?”

“Different,” Maura said, semplicistially. Being part of the old guard, she did pilot old models with just Calla, or just Persephone, but the last five years were with Fox. “Heavier at times, so much easier in others. But Persephone would have told you that it’s always better, in three...so I think that’s what you should remember” 

“Better even for me?” 

He lifted his eyes again, because speaking with the person who helped him hold the line at the bottom of the Ocean, he didn’t have to pretend he wasn’t somewhat _damaged_ by the effort. 

Maura smiled at his efforts, and straightened the jacket of Gansey’s uniform, whether it needed it or not, before undoing the first lacing of the high collar. It was antithetical and at the same time perfect for her — perfect for Gansey’s own mood, too.

“Better especially for you. It will be different from what we had, I’m sure. But everything is sturdier, in threes. More stable, once you’re sharing the same step.” 

“Will there even be two more pilots for me to drift with?” 

That concern felt more pressing than finding the optimum equilibrium with three variables. There weren’t many pilots to begin with, anymore — even less capable of withstanding a drift with a last generation Mark-III model like the Fox-Glendower merge will be. And Gansey, who had a history of being vaguely compatible with a lot of people and in perfect tune with very few, wasn’t just as confident, even without counting headaches and brain scatter.

Maura laughed and walked towards the door, evidently ready to take her leave on this note. 

“You’ll be fine. For that, you can trust me and Calla, because we’re _still_ your Lieutenant Generals, Colonel.”

Gansey took it as a cue to click his heels together, even though Maura always found formalities more entertaining than necessary. Taking responsibility and keeping the trust was a weird exercise of being pulled in different directions. 

“Yes, ma’am.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


The landing grounds outside of the base were mostly barren by years and years of vehicles, airborne and not, passing through them on a daily basis. It was a weird day, with sweeping winds coming from the sea, and the rain thinned in the air almost horizontal, diffusing like mist even though the real clouds were high and fast-moving in the sky. 

Not even the roof of the loading platform kept Gansey totally safe from the wetness, and yet he waited, rather than retreating back inside. 

The technical personnel moved around him with ease, leaving Gansey mostly by his own devices after the initial pleasantries. These were all men and women he knew, with whom he trusted seeing pilots in and out of the base on official missions — though not in and out of Glendower, as the landing and deploying site of the Jaegers was on the other side of the base, close to the shore. 

None of them questioned why he was alone. To some degrees, Gansey didn’t question it himself. There had been several meetings in the last few weeks, on budgeting and planning and general tedious but necessary politics, so he had been eager to see things in motion. Ronan, who refused to be involved in any of it, had been nowhere to be seen, and so Gansey was left to wait for his new copilots with the sole company of the terrible weather.

He had memorised the route: Los Angeles to Tokyo, Tokyo to Taipei, Taipei to Hong Kong, and then final landing in the Shatterdome Headquarters. Taiwan had been the purely military stop, because each division of the Pan Pacific Defence Corp was supposed to operate with low traceability, even when the operation was not strictly classified. 

Gansey wasn’t sure if his copilots were classified. Everyone was waiting for them, the whole base buzzed with the excitement of news that wasn’t related to some terrible loss, but this was a fake perception given by the insular reality of the Corps. Outside, no news would talk about it, not if a victory to boost the civilian population’s morale wasn’t available yet.

His thoughts were derailing. He knew they were. 

Unsurprisingly, Helen was probably right on the fact that he had always been a scatterbrain, but he was so aware of it now — of all his little failings, of his little flares — that discerning anxiety from drift damage was a challenge.

Ronan had been skeptical when Gansey had told him there two new pilots were to come, that they would be Gansey’s new team. Skeptical, then pensive, then angry. They were admittedly moving slowly for the rhythm of Kaiju events they learned to withstand in the last ten years. The data from Greywaren were difficult to analyse, extensive repairs required attention and an intense amount of politics. 

Gansey, who was no stranger to duty, had every intention of _making this right_ , for everyone.

The new members — his copilots — were late. 

It might be the weather, it might be accumulated delay in intercontinental travel, but Gansey was having a terminal case of itchy fingers. In another situation, he would have accessed his high-clearance account and checked this mission every step of the way. In this increasingly frustrating situation, though, Helen had insistent that he had to meet them in the same way _normal people_ met. So _them_ didn’t even have a name. 

By the time the notification of an incoming authorised vehicle arrived, a minute more might have lead him to snap.

“Do you want to make a good impression?” Helen had laughed, hours prior, after Gansey had returned to their rooms freshly showered and clean shaven, and actually put effort in setting his hair in a shape that even Mother would approve of.

So what if _he did_?

Any damage that wind and humidity didn’t do to his hair during the wait was quickly covered by the landing of the helicopter, swiping the concrete in concentric circles with the motions of the helix. 

He walked forward, while _they_ got off. 

They were a man and a woman, both around the same age as Gansey and Ronan, give or take. 

The girl dark-skinned, and healthily tanned on top of that, so short that she must have barely passed the physical requirement for the piloting training when she joined. It took Gansey a second to figure out that the weird colouring of her hair in this rainy day was due to the amount of clips and pins, outrageously bright, that she pinned her dark hair with. 

The man was more than a head taller than her, lean and unmistakably of Asian descent from his features. He appeared even taller, because in clear disregard of the bad weather, his hair seemed to defy gravity. 

Their uniforms were not the one of the Headquarter Shatterdome, though they sported the stripes of the Piloting Division — not Colonels, just Majors. And the woman’s uniform was so personalised to be almost _bastardised_ , like a civilian would do to sport a look without any real weight behind it.

They suited each other so very well. They walked in a smooth accord that seemed to disregard any difference in height or bulk, not obsessively in perfect synch as Ronan and Niall had been, just — matching. 

Gansey stopped two steps from them, and though he didn’t owe them a salute he straightened anyway. “Ma’am, Sir, this is Colonel Richard Gansey III. You have my most warm welcome to the Hong Kong Shatterdome, I’m thrilled to have you here.”

He wanted to survey both their reaction, subtly, but any plan was disrupted by the outright glare that stared up at him from the woman.

“Wow, he didn’t even bother learning our names.” 

They weren’t even straightening in an approximation of military salute. The breach wasn’t an _outrage_ , but immediately disrupted the script that Gansey had spent the last hours mentally rehearsing. It had been good, and now it was gone, in less than thirty seconds. He blinked.

“I’m sure there is a perfectly nice explanation, am I wrong?” The man said, reaching forward with a greeting right hand and an attentive stare of dark, deep eyes. “Henry Cheng — Major, Minor, Middle, Average, might change by the moment.”

Gansey blinked again, but went to shake the hand — a firm grip, broad hand, surprisingly smooth for Pilot’s standards. “Nice...I mean, nice to meet you. I apologise, I was shut out of all of my authorisations the moment I was informed that you were coming. For...for authenticity?”

He didn’t sound so convinced and conversely the woman was not looking terribly impressed. “I think the most you know about authenticity is how to spell it. I’m not going to announce you, try again.”

It was too humid to be blinking so much but Gansey left Henry’s hand to reach forward the still-unnamed girl. “Gansey.” 

“Just Gansey?” 

“That’s all there is.”

Strangers would call him Colonel, Helen and sometimes his family would call him Dick, but beyond that all, there was just Gansey.

She stared him head to feet still didn’t take his hand. This was going terribly.

He repressed a sigh in favour of the last vestiges of composure. “Well, Henry Cheng...Jane...would you like to follow me inside so we can make our way to the base?”

They both had some heavy bags tossed over their shoulders, and it must not be such a crazy proposition, even though Gansey had basically been forced to default to the universal Unknown Female Subject designation. And yet the girl’s anger seemed to flare even more, even while Henry gave an unrepentant snort.

“Did you just call me _Jane_?!” 

“You’re not giving me a name, how am I supposed to address you?”

“My name is Blue!” 

The girl said it with enough self-righteousness to fill the quota of the whole Pan Pacific Defence Corps, but for all his previous attempts at composure this was Gansey’s cue to lift his eyebrows and draw a line. 

_Code Blue_ had been the official designation for a top priority Kaiju alert from the Pacific Rim. You don’t just call for Blue in the Headquarter Shatterdome. 

“Okay, if that’s the case, Jane is much better. Shall we take our leave to the buildings?”

Another snort from Henry, who seemed almost disbelieving at a glance. Jane’s _disbelief_ bordered outright rage. This kept getting better and better. 

“Excuse you?!” She took a step forward, and Gansey stayed very still because he really didn’t want to escalate this further. Not because she was particularly intimidating, though he had the vague hunch she could kick him in the shins where he stood. “My name is Blue Sargent, Major if you must, but really, don’t.”

“Sargent like the Lieutenant General? That coincidence is going to cause confusions,” Gansey countered, feeling perfectly reasonable. Calling someone by their surname was commonplace, if you weren’t scrambling ranks in doing so.

She crooked her head to the side as if she was ready to headbutt him. It was a weirdly familiar gesture, somehow.

“Coincidence my ass, Maura Sargent is my mother.”

A laughter bubbled in Gansey’s throat before he could quench it in the strength of years of military training. This Blue-girl wouldn’t look too bad as Maura’s daughter — similar jawline, the way the curve of her eyebrows countered shape of her eyes. She would be an incredibly pretty daughter. But the Fox team and been introduced to him more than seven years prior, and Maura never mentioned a family beyond her copilots. 

“I’m very well acquainted with Lieutenant General Sargent, that doesn’t quite match.”

Maybe he should have counted more seconds, arranged a sentence less obnoxiously, because the flush spreading across Blue’s cheekbones, all the way to her ears, spoke of outright _fury_. She planted her feet and spun around with a whipping gesture that sent her bag flying off her shoulder and in full collision trajectory with Gansey. He grabbed it, but just barely — the effect was akin to trying to hold Ronan’s punching bag while he trained. 

“Fuck you,” she hissed, already walking past him in the thin rain. “Go ask her, asshole, and then come crawling back. See how _I_ ’ll be laughing.”

With the squeaking of the soles of her combat boots against wet concrete, she disappeared into the building as if she owned the place — or was ready to destroy it. 

Gansey watched her go, with yet another terrible sense of misplaced assumptions. With his arms wrapped around the bag, he turned towards Henry, who was staring at him as a deeply entertained hawk. 

“Is she the daughter?” Gansey asked, gingerly. 

“Yuppp,” Henry dragged the sound until he popped on his lips like a fizzy drink.

“Oh. Shit.”

Even in face of this outright tragedy, Henry laughed without malice — at Gansey, at the situation, at the rain even. He patted Gansey’s shoulder and started to walk towards the building as well.

“You really sent that flying, Gansey-boy. Show me this base, would you?”

With Blue’s bag over his shoulder, Gansey followed.

This was a _tragedy_.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 2 will be out on **Saturday May 11th**
> 
> In the meantime, find me on [my Tumblr](http://seekthemist.tumblr.com), the askbox is always open!!!


	3. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised, here we go with the weekly update, and Chapter 2 brings us everyone into the spotlight and settles the dynamics that we will need for the rest of the story!
> 
> From here onwards, the chapters have multiple POVs inserted, to give different cuts of the story. In this chapter in particular there will be a bit of a non-linear timeline to cover the same range of time from the point of view of two different characters.
> 
> Thank you very much for your support to this story, I appreciate it to hell and back!
> 
> For those of you who missed it, Is [(spaceykiddo)](https://thenightfury.co.vu/) recently released an art inspired from the prologue: [Come find it over here!](https://thenightfury.co.vu/post/184660025778/first-piece-of-many-more-to-come-inspired-by-the)
> 
> And as usual, please enjoy!

  
  
  


Broadly speaking, every Shatterdome was the same. Shielding, concrete, more shielding, expanding three times more underground than the overground. Buildings with a “normal”, almost business-like arrangement alternated with huge forbidding hangars that could only be crossed with metal gangways and stairs. Everything interconnected, secure and under constant control. 

But if one were to look at a fundamental level, a Shatterdome was made of the quirks of the people that inhabited it. 

This was even more true for the Hong Kong Headquarter, where the best of what any section of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps had to offer pumped genius and efforts, keeping the machine moving and breathing smoothly one strict shift after the other. 

Blue had seen this little dance by proxy, well-oiled and apparently effortless, in every official news that disclosed carefully-approved footages from Hong Kong. Sometimes — much more rarely — pictures or snatched video-calls from Maura, Persephone, or Calla, when they were feeling defiant or borderline affectionate. 

It wasn’t equivalent to knowing the _reality_ of it, after so many years of having been stubbornly denied a taste. So Blue roamed every corner, every path, following maps full of unfamiliar labels as far as her authorisations would bring her. 

Doing it _for the big picture_ was much better than admitting that she was studiously trying to avoid the majority of the base. 

Between her copilots, her family, and people at various degrees of closeness to the first two categories there were too many people that had quickly come to grasp that she was _Lieutenant General Sargent’s daughter_. The list of conversations she didn’t want to have was rapidly growing. 

So far, she had resisted a week with minimal contact.

Strangers were the easier to avoid, superficially interested in her only as long as she put herself squarely within their grasp. She had to cave to answer some questions while she got her security clearances, access and gadgets in order, but if she had to be fair it was far from the most stressful thing she had to withstand. Being dead-set on avoiding the canteen at the peak hours — opting for either the outrageously early or the senselessly late — had let her sneak away from that dangerous circle of the high ranking officials, who were strangers as far as she was concerned but a second family in any other regard.

Her actual, first and only family was feasible to deal with. Her mother must have sensed that they were on a cold-war arrangement, and streered mostly clear of Blue as studiously as Blue had avoided her. Calla had come to greet her, immediately cutting to the chase of telling Blue to _cut her bullshit_ , and would still check on her with the same crude warning every couple of days. Cutting her bullshit was, however, more part of the problem than part of the solution. She wanted to discuss so furiously she didn’t know what to talk about _exactly_. Maybe Persephone would have known what she wanted to talk about before Blue herself — but Persephone was gone.

Conversely, avoiding his copilots was borderline _impossible_. 

First of all, it would have involved avoiding Henry, and Blue would be caught dead before she let it happen. 

There had been a moment of wicked satisfaction in seeing that bombastic asshole — allegedly called Gansey — looking at the two of them unloading both of their things in the same room. 

“Pilots don’t sleep together _together_ ,” he had stressed on the repeated word, with the tone of someone relating the sacred law. 

It was an unwritten-but-highly-recommended rule that Blue was all too acquainted with. It fostered codependency, it falsified the drift statistics, it exacerbated conflicts — the list of reasons was long and convoluted and not fully without merit. But Blue and Henry were not like every pilot — some would say they were barely pilots — so this worked for them. It was certainly not _Gansey_ ’s business — even while it arguably was, now — so Blue just answered, “And yet, we do. And we will,” in a blatant challenge to try and antagonise her. Fresh off the Maura-Sargent-has-no-daughters tragedy, Gansey had the good sense of stay silent and cave.

Second of all, and not exactly less important, being at the HQ was superbly annoying but Blue and Henry were on a non-negotiable duty. They had begrudgingly — at least on Blue’s side — started to adapt their training routine to a three-people flow rather than a more usual pair. It was hard, and stumbling like a newborn fawn, but the necessary effort bidded time from any other issue and distracted Blue from the ever-present impulse to strangle Gansey.

When they said that you should never meet your idols they should have probably pasted Gansey’s picture on the explanatory pamphlet and attach a lengthy explanation on how the statement was applicable to him.

Colonel Richard Campbell Gansey III was famous. He had been since he had been just a Sergeant, and now his glossed pictures would feature in any history book. He and his sister and previous copilot Helen had been the poster kids for each and every recruitment ads for the Pan Pacific Defence Corps, piloting division training. Seeing him in person didn’t lessen the impression he made on a pamphlet or an video — broad-shouldered and with the steady expression of reliable American old-money, so impossibly beautiful next to his sister who looked ready to be the CEO of a multi-billion company the moment she solved this saving the world business. The fact that he was a complete asshole incapable of common decency didn’t even scar Gansey’s character too much — which was in itself infuriating.

Compared to him and Ronan Lynch, of whom Blue had yet to get even a glimpse, Blue was the most unflattering example of “yet another _family business_ in the Shatterdome”. And the fact that Blue was used to losing competitions even before they were opened it didn’t mean she looked forward to being _not terrible, but certainly not good enough_.

In short, this week had been excruciatingly stressful.

Furthermore, the fact that they had been summoned for a debrief in less than an hour correlated strongly with Blue’s needs to be as far away as possible from the assigned meeting room.

That’s how she found herself in the Technical team’s Hangar, where that little Frankenstein monster of a Jaeger — that they will pilot, sooner rather than later — was undergoing its cycles of repairs. 

After years of watching live streams of battles thousands of kilometers away from her, recognising Fox matched strangely with the realisation that this was a fundamentally different Jaeger. 

It stood more than 85 meters high, its freshly chromated shielding had an iridescent shine in the artificial light of the hangar, like a bird showcasing its feathers. Looking up — and up, and up — Blue could barely get a glimpse of the helmet, fitted close to the shoulders to provide maximum sturdiness to the chamber with the piloting hutch. 

It would be hers, in every way that counted. 

The fact that it happened after the finishing line, when the purpose seemed to be avoiding accusations of inefficiency to the Corps, tainted the emotion with bitterness. 

She clicked her tongue, but found herself still reluctant to leave, looking around as if making an inventory of the place could make the Fox-Glendower merge less monumental. 

The space was so big that she heard the sound of people at work rather than seeing them — drills, blower, occasional warning beeping from a machinery in motion.

At the corner of her eyes, someone got up, channelling her attention. 

He was young and nondescript like most of the technical team tended to be. Blue usually faulted their work uniform, a deep grey-blue that merged all too well with the metal frames that tended to surround them. The guy had a bag strapped on each thigh, full of equipment, and was taking some readings from an instrument. Blue wasn’t an expert. She was still curious, though, so she closed their distance a bit, taking a couple of steps down a ramp that joined two adjacent platforms. 

The metal junctions squeaked and the guy turned. 

Blue immediately regretted having though he was nondescript, because there was something undeniably eye-catching in his features — a bit strange at the first glance, in a way that could either make you turn around immediately or call for some inadvertent staring. High cheekbones, serious expression, fair eyebrows. 

“Good afternoon, ma’am, can I help you?” He said, sliding into an easy version of attention. Respectful without being deferential in a way that usually hid some judgment, in Blue’s experience.

“Hello, sorry, I think I’m trespassing a bit,” Blue admitted, with a cheeky smile. 

The guy smiled back, a subtle gesture that made Blue suspect that even though at the beginning she would have pinned as older than her, they were probably of the same age. 

“Not at all. Was there something specific you wanted to give a look at?”

Taken aback, Blue stuttered just a bit. “Can I?...I mean, I don’t...survey, that is.”

“You could, of course.” The guy did an excellent job at hiding a broader smile and still didn’t drop all formalities. “You’re the pilot, ma’am.”

It was just a statement, net and unquestionable, and still it flipped something in Blue’s chest. This member of the Technical team had recognised her — respected her, even — and dropped her rights at her feet just like that. 

She was the pilot.

Arguably, she had been a pilot for years, but the Los Angeles Shatterdome mostly sported old models or unfinished prototypes of Jaeger. It was meant for containment and support dispatch, not for the front line, and while she and Henry had a favourite Jaeger among the possible ones, it didn’t mean it was theirs. But this was.

“It’s Blue.” She said. Then, since the guy had turned around with a bit confused to look at the chromature of the Jaeger, she specified. “I mean, I’m Blue. You can call me Blue.”

“Ah!” He wasn’t surprised by the name, which was to be expected if he already got news of the new additions to the troops, but he offered no comments on the matter. “Sure. I’m Adam Parrish. Adam.”

When she shook his hand, he had a firm but not overwhelming grip, and the palms of a worker rather than those of a pilot. “Nice to meet you, Adam. Can you run me through the state of this thing?” 

Adam kept his distance after their handshake, not exactly weary but composed and with a gaze that only met her sideways. He didn’t miss too many seconds but his reply was careful. “I’m not the Chief Mechanical Tech-Officier.”

“The CMTO won’t report to me, though.” She let her grin spread, a bit wicked, and was delighted in seeing Adam catching up, with a flash in his eyes.

He put away all of his instrumentation, and tilted his head towards the rest of the metal stage, spanning the hangar around the Jaeger for hundreds of meters in front of them. 

“Okay, Blue, let’s take a walk.”

By the time Blue’s pager came alive confirming her the meeting room and the estimated time of arrival for the meeting, she felt much better prepared to face whatever technicality was ahead of her, and a bit less desperate on the virtue of the population at the Hong Kong Shatterdome.

“You’re the best, Adam, I’ll come again, bye!” She waved and talking while walking. 

Somehow, Adam had an air of surprise while bidding her goodbye. Maybe he got too used to the stick in everyone’s arse here, too, and it would mean that Blue was even less alone.

Giving the sheer dimension of the Headquarter, the journey to the meeting room involved three escalator, two elevators, some moving pavements and a good amount of walking. 

At her arrival, her good mood immediately quenched by seeing that she was alone in the room, save for Calla and Maura already seated at the head of the table, and staring at her expectantly. 

“Let’s say I’ll come back later,” she grumbled, but didn’t really take the door back where she came from.

“Blue, sit down, come on,” Maura said. It was the rational tone, not the _Lieutenant General_ tone, and Blue hated how the difference affected her, how easy it was to sense her own faults if her mother was being _rational_.

She sat down, but stayed silent.

“Do we need to do the sulking interlude?” Calla asked, always direct.

“You didn’t even tell them you have a daughter,” Blue countered, as if it were an answer to the rhetorical question. Maybe she should have addressed it to Maura explicitly, but it had always been a difficult exercise to discern if only one of the three was a parent — and that remained her, even now, when three had become two.

“That’s a bit against the purpose of not keeping you by my side, isn’t it? The walls gossip in Shatterdomes,” Maura argued.

“But it’s not against the purpose to call me in once you won the war, to do some clean up. Which, since we’re on the topic, even the L.A. Dome can handle...that’s like, how much those residues sucks.” Her tone railed up while elaborating. She was coming from a subpar location, she had spent the war in a subpar location, and being in Hong Kong now was not a prize.

Calla’s huff shook her shoulders, no less thick with muscles that Blue remembered. “It’s still a war, kid. It turns out that you can actually kill Niall Lynch...trust me it doesn’t go without saying...But we’re here with a new playing field and we had to find a way.”

“Because Persephone is dead?” 

For a second, just a second, she felt bold and strong for being able to say it as it was — out loud and uncompromising. Then she looked at Maura and Calla, at the grief that surged up — almost stale, as if they were constantly drowning in it and barely keeping their chin tilted upwards from the surface of the water — and she just felt silly. 

“I’m sorry… I mean…”

“Yes, but no.” Maura cut through, serious but not really cross. “That’s not the only thing that changed, it’s just too many variables all together.”

“Said very brutally…” Calla stopped two seconds to address Maura’s eyeroll with “...My speciality, yes, I know, but. Said brutally. We have an entire Headquarter with no functioning team of pilots. You don’t want the world knocking at our door over it, and trust me...you’ll see in a bit...they are _this_ close.”

Blue stared at Calla’s thumb and index finger, pressed together as if to physically give her a clue of how close _they_ were. She sensed a pattern, not only in the debrief between current and on-hold pilots that was about to begin but also in this constant narrative for which the Corps were there for the world and, somehow, against it at the same time. It still left her sour, somewhere deep inside.

“Then you need a trusted patch to cover this leaking hole. Makes sense.”

Maura’s eyeroll was all Blue’s to enjoy, this time around. “No, we needed to take the only route that could work, Blue, please.”

“I’m a terrible pilot,” she admitted it, in a rush. 

After all, this would always be the beginning and the end of any problem, of why she had been shielded rather than tossed in the war alongside her family — like the Ganseys did, and the Lynches did. 

“You’re the only pilot that can do it.” Calla replied only when Blue had let the confession sink deep enough to bring her eyes back to the two of them.

As comforting as the statement might sound, at twenty years old Blue was too old for illusions, for gratuitous uplifting. She shook her head. It sounded fake. “I don’t...I don’t understand how or why.”

Maura pressed her hands on the armrest of the chair and lifted up smoothly, evidently calling a halt to the discussion to set up the upcoming presentation. “Then maybe start from there, before you end up in a drift with no idea of what’s going on.”

Blue wanted to protest and ask for clarity — after years and years of cryptic video calls at timezones of distance she had a personal vendetta towards the approach — but the sliding door of the meeting room swooshed open.

To add insult to injury at Calla and Maura being saved by the gong, Henry and Gansey came in together. Henry had that typical expression of when he was very engaged by something new, and it felt like a terrible betrayal. She stayed put on the chair and really didn’t provide greetings, acknowledging just Henry sitting beside her with a judgemental tilt of her head. Across him, as if on the other side of a buffer, Gansey was looking at her as well. 

Without saying anything, she angled the backrest of her chair to be in the way enough to make clear that she wasn’t going to talk.

She caved and turned around just a bit only when the door opened again, letting Helen Gansey inside. Just as her little brother, she wasn’t less impressive in person that she was on poster, even with the funky haircut she now sported in lieu of the clean high-end-lawyer-turned-colonel that made her famous as one of the public faces of the Corps. She would have been eye-catching for anyone even without the prosthetic arm, but with it the focus shifted towards a different awareness. 

Helen Gansey, world saviour and war survivor. 

Blue had to turn again on her chair because — after a brief moment of hesitation in finding her brother already sat beside someone else — she went to take her place across from Blue. 

Maura uttered something to Calla, they waited for two incredibly awkward minutes in a complete silence broken only by some shuffling around of paper and fabrics. Eventually, they gave up to the non-negotiable fact that Ronan Lynch was not joining them. The notion seemed to weigh on every established pilot, with Helen glancing at Maura and Calla as if seeking guidance, and then exchanging a couple of deceptively intense stares with her brother. 

The two of them had the same way of looking at one another that Maura, Calla, and Persephone had once had: private, exclusive, transcending.

Henry and Blue were tight, but they hadn't gone through hell and back in the way that the rest of the people in the room had. Maybe the gap will never close, and she could think of little else throughout the whole meeting. Even in the absence of Lynch as the fifth war hero of the bunch, the attendance in the room stung like stepping barefoot on stinging nettle. 

It was an important meeting politically more than operatively speaking, and Blue could grasp that much even with half of her attention elsewhere. The U.N. was tightening up their timescale for reports, apparently escalating after considering the grieving period successfully concluded with Blue and Henry’s arrival. Outside of what was supposed to be a unifying body conveying the emergency necessity of the whole world, Helen reported that single states were starting to pipe up from their private channels. Notes by Declan Lynch suggested that a lot of industry and advanced research centres were advancing for contact as well.

The Headquarter Shatterdome of Hong Kong was steadily getting cornered, it seemed. 

“One would have thought the fear of doom would stick a bit longer,” Helen said, conveying the maximum of her disappointment through a flick of a stray fringe of hair. 

“In the face of greed? Never,” Calla snorted. “We knew they would run to get their hands on our weapons. We need to secure some arrangements, we should have started earlier…”

But they were running late because reality changed under their feet. Everyone heard the undertone, and Blue heard it even more strongly given the private conversation she’d just had.

“We might need to escalate to the General and the board of advisors the possibility of surrendering some minor concessions from other Shatterdomes to buy time.” Gansey seemed to be sailing as smoothly in the situation as he did on the training ground, or on documentaries, or on public debates, or interview. 

When Blue glanced back, Gansey was sliding his tablet towards Helen, catching hers in exchange all the way across the smooth surface of the table. The thumb of his left hand stroked over his bottom lip in concentration, and Blue followed it with her eyes two seconds too long before the whole situation boiled in her veins and she turned around again. The tables on the shared screen on the wall weren’t so telling, for her, but she stared wholes into them regardless.

No one expected her or Henry to have anything to say. And it was only fair, after all, because they didn’t. 

What wasn’t fair is that she wanted _more_ , and _more_ appeared constantly out of reach. 

The meeting was adjourned on the underlying tune that a fundamental tactical part of what was to come lied on Blue, Henry and Gansey being able to bring out yet another Jaeger-wonder from the Shatterdome. 

Blue went to take the door as soon as she could.

“Blue, ohi…”

Having Henry hot on her heels wasn’t so surprising, and a part of her felt like a total shit for the fact that even he irked her to death. Following that part, she turned, already several meters away from the door but not really distant enough that the people in attendance could be oblivious of what was going on.

“Are you going to say something? Do something? Anything?” Henry pressed on, voice hushed. He stood close to her, head tilted downwards to be able to look at her without _looking down_ on her. 

“Do you want me to say that I’m open to suggestions?” Blue countered. She was being contrary, she knew she was being contrary.

“Oh, that would be stellar, I must have hit the wrong time of the day though, and the fact that you’re not open to suggestions actually means something.” Henry spoke so fast, as he often did when he was a bit on edge, that it would have been difficult to understand if Blue hadn’t been his drift pair for years.

“What, Henry?” She snapped. “Just _what_?”

“You’re avoiding me, you’re avoiding _him_ , I don’t understand where we’re going with this.”

“Right, because you _like him_.” She didn’t bother keeping the tone of accusation out of her voice. “You could always go wherever you want with _him_ , if you're looking for someone to say something or do anything with.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Henry cut through, with a tense frown. “I came here with _you_ , shit is hitting the fan and flying around. We’re a team!”

Something in the statement, the increasing conceited tone of it, cut more deeply than Blue had forecasted. She dropped her eyes to the floor, with a couple of false starts of useless inhaling that didn’t lead to an actual replying.

“Yeah, I’m trying to figure out what I’m bringing to the team this time, okay? Give me a damn second.”

Henry had given her a week worth of seconds, but when she turned around and escaped through the neon lit corridors Blue knew he was going to allow her some more.

She wasn’t so sure what to do with them, but she could recognise an ultimatum.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Henry Cheng had been sixteen years old when he had been transferred from the Manila Shatterdome to the Los Angeles one. 

Los Angeles could have also been called Los “Assets that are still valuable but a bit subpar for the current requirements of the war”. Each of the people there had something that didn’t click perfectly with the requirements — either by nature, or by some sort of traumatic nurture — but none of them actually dropped below the passing marks for physical and mental compatibility to the drift. It was a team of underdogs, riddled by nicknames and with questionable dynamics, and Henry was furiously attached to each of them, like a second family forged through a different type of blood.

Even among painfully _standard_ people, Blue Sargent had managed to be an odd one out, not peculiar enough to be attractive for the Headquarter, it seemed, but still incapable of merging into the background. On top of that, she had always been pretty, and witty, and with personality to spare and shove down other people’s throat. 

Henry had wanted to poke her, just a bit, like the irascible bear she was, just to get something out of her that was _exclusive_ for him. It worked, and then it morphed, and then she was his copilot. Nothing in the world could go deeper than sharing a drift. Henry had loved the first chaotic flow of her mind pouring into his own, and had been incapable of stopping.

When they told him they were being transferred to Hong Kong — exactly in the moment when everyone was expecting the Corps to start winding down the duties, reassign forces and redistribute efforts towards _peace_ — he had known that something was profoundly out of place. And at the same time, he understood instinctively that what the Headquarter wanted was likely to be Blue, not him. 

It didn’t matter. He followed her, across the ocean, in spite of every perplexity — ready to face missions that no one had bothered to specify save from _new Jaeger_ and _three pilots_.

He knew her so well, and she was so dear to him, that no explanation was required about all the ways a direct clash with Colonel Richard Gansey III was going to be a problem. She looked up at him, and she thought him arrogant. She found him attractive, and she found him annoying. She wanted to be him, and she wanted him to drop the attitude. 

Each of these dichotomies had remained true, with no clarification in one sense or the other, at their very first dialogue under the rain.

What he hadn’t expected was _himself_ in the same picture — or, possibly, he had deemed it as secondary while Blue tried and failed not to appear jittery in hours of intercontinental travel. 

Colonel Gansey turned out to be a puzzling creature, who wore his grades and fame effortlessly. The unquestionable grace that had been broadcasted in all the advertising content of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps was undeniably there, and at the same time had detonated a whole conversation in the span of a ten minute exchange.

It went without saying that Henry understood Blue perfectly. He was her drift-companion, they would always understand each other. So it would make sense if he was just gobbling up Blue’s perception. And yet, she was annoyed and hurt, and Henry was just _intensely entertained_.

After a life spent in the corners, he kept thinking, _this is it, this is it_.

Sat on the bed of their room, he looked at Blue slamming the sliding doors shut in front of Gansey’s dismayed face, after having made abundantly clear that they were going to sleep _together_. He smiled even in front of her thunderous expression, while Blue stomped back in front of him. He stared up as she stared down, and then tilted his head back when Blue’s possessive touch combed through his hair — the only exception in the world, to be allowed to destroy his _personality_ like this.

“Having regrets?” Henry asked, a few seconds and a destroyed hairdo later.

“We can’t do regrets if we don’t have a choice.” She replied, cupping Henry’s head with both hands. Her voice rumbled all the way down his body, and Henry thought he could hear the vibration of it even on her stomach, where he was resting his chin.

“Well, you know the extremes. We take out things, we desert, we hike through Vietnam like fugitives and learn how to live a life in the countryside, farms and goats and sustenance.”

Blue smiled, and let her hands slide down from Henry’s head to his shoulders, hugging him closer. “I want to keep my goats. Let’s see what deals they have for us and the _saving the world_ business first.”

Henry nodded with ease, looping his arms around Blue’s thighs to keep her close. 

It sounded steady and resolute, and yet as she lay beside him on the narrow bed, her breathing didn’t ease and Henry knew she was not sleeping. And the day after, she didn’t go and chase after Lieutenant General Sargent or Lieutenant General Johnson — as they were in this base, rather than Maura and Calla, with whom Henry had spoken through secured videocomms, occasionally, throughout the years. Likewise, Blue tried to adapt her and Henry’s training routine to the new environment, but that also seemed to involve ignoring Gansey or actively avoiding him every time their paths crossed. 

This was going to be a mess, which of course meant Henry would have be the buffer.

It was all too easy, to go and find this outstanding war hero, knowing full well that he couldn’t be rejected or questioned in his drive because Henry was _part and parcel_ of this whole business. Admittedly, it was easier than try to pin Blue when she was squirming away like a pissed-off eel in a pond. Richard Gansey wasn’t actively trying to avoid Henry — and maybe, just maybe, the curiosity was reciprocal. 

Gansey — Richard, the Third, Dick, Colonel, Seventh Pilot in hierarchy, Glendower-beta or G-b — was weirdly affable, almost eager to interact at times. Other times, it was difficult to shake off the feeling that he was pulling ranks, when the fact that he had virtually spent his whole life in a military facility shone through. 

He trained with perfect form and smooth drills, effortlessly correcting little quirks in Henry’s countering that he himself had never noticed — and that didn’t affect his performance, overall, but everything was better if he followed directions. Henry had always been good at following directions — nature and nurture and all that lot — but had never reward to his compliance as strongly as he did when his back went in perfect line with his shoulders and the next hit delivered to Gansey fell strong and sudden. 

“Just like that,” Gansey had smiled, a little wicked, and Henry’s stomach hadn’t flip in that way since the day Blue had pinned him down with the most unorthodox maneuvering. 

So different, and yet so similar.

Henry also noticed that something different seemed to click in Gansey if you pushed him hard enough that he forgot himself, in the same way an ember wouldn’t think when it cracked and popped in a fireplace. 

With their training sticks crossed and a stalemate of strength and countering to keep them in position, Henry had looked down at him one afternoon, barely a week after their arrival, and loomed down on Gansey, pressing on the advantage of being taller. There was sweat on the side of Gansey’s nose, and his hair clung to his temples, but he looked up at Henry, and grinned. 

Drifting with him would be so intense. 

The fact that Helen Gansey had been watching made it better, and worse, at the same time. He might have just imagined it, with the smug way she tossed them both a towel after. But there was a fundamental level of guilt in basically telling someone, _I want to take your drift partner_.

The guilt easily extended to Blue and the scorn in her eyes every time Henry shuttled back and forth between them, like a spool. As if Henry was _fraternising with the enemy_ rather than doing exactly what they discussed — saving-the-world business first. It was unfair, and yet the aftereffect of the drift dictated that Henry didn’t have the luxury of _not understanding_.

“You named your Jaeger?” Henry asked, one evening. 

Blue was nowhere to be found at dinner, even though Henry had left an empty spot beside him. Gansey had an equally empty spot in front of him for Colonel Ronan Lynch, second Missing In Action of the base.

Helen, who had been discussing recent technical developments with her brother, gracefully paused to let Henry into the conversation. Words flew liberal between the brothers, they probably always would, but Gansey turned towards Henry with ease. “Yes, of course. Baptising on the first blood and all that.”

“Of course,” Henry echoed, with only half a smile. “I just never piloted more than a prototype or a refurbished previous test model of a Mark series.”

There was no reason to hide the truth, and yet Gansey blinked, and replied, as if it were nothing. “Oh. Well, I’m glad you will be, now. You’ll be an excellent pilot, Cheng.”

So supportive, like a leader. Henry wanted to smash a hand on his face and ran it through until his skin pulled, but didn’t. “So...why Glendower?”

Maybe it was the wrong thing to say, or just the right one. Helen looked slightly spooked and instead Gansey lit up like a lightbulb at full power.

“You brought this onto yourself, Henry, this is where I finish my dinner,” she informed him, with a supportive pat on Henry’s shoulders, before picking up her tray and bringing it to the kitchen racks.

“That’s very uncalled for, it’s an excellent story!” Gansey called after her, slightly outraged, before whipping back towards Henry. “I swear, it is!”

Henry wanted to smile, and figured two seconds later that there was no reason not to. “And will you tell me about it?”

That was the right answer, of course, in the sense that catapulted Henry into a conversation about Welsh Kings and epic battles, and weird names that Gansey would correct slowly but painstakingly every time he received a very tentative follow-up question about one allegedly historical person that did something. The story started in the canteen, continued in the corridors and ended up in Gansey’s room, at the far end of the corridor where Henry and Blue were lodged as well. 

Gansey’s room was a half-scholar, half-tactician madness. It didn’t match the public persona that Gansey spoon-fed to anyone he interacted with as an official of the Corps — and yet, it provided an explanation for a lot of little quirks that jumped to the eye if you just stared long enough. It made Henry’s hands itch for more than just a touch, so of course he kept his hands for himself. 

Gansey dragged him forward — past schematic recollections of battles arranged with the rigor of a chessboard and with post-its of do and don’t ranked in priority — to sit him in front of photocopied manuscripts and pictures of Wales. It was the most paper Henry had ever seen in any base of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps, and he tilted forward, elbows on his knees, to listen better.

“And that’s how you land to your homonym, Henry — Henry the Fourth, not strictly historically speaking but Shakespeare-wise. Deeds worthy of a legend, enough to make a man that _calls spirits from the vasty deep_ believable. Some say he was never dead, as if he could not die, just remain stuck in a slumber for the valiants to wake…”

Henry’s eyes followed Gansey in his passionate argument, closing with a small sigh towards a picture of a statue as he rested his side against the desk. The words faded, woefully, and silence remained. 

The door connecting Gansey and Helen’s room was open, and yet this was indisputably the most intimate Henry has ever been with this war hero.

“This is very impressive,” Henry remarked, because if there was one trait that was easy to catch in Gansey was his enjoyment for positive reinforcement. “You should go and find him...your King.”

The first sentence won him a smile, but the second struck a chord of surprise. For all the unchecked flow of words that came before, hesitation lingered for one second, and then one more, and when Gansey looked back at Henry the hint of confusion was still there. 

“Well, that is a nice thought that very much requires another life, I’m afraid.”

“You can have one,” Henry said. Sometimes, one drill after another, one alarm after another, that was the only thought that kept him going. “Once we’re done here. Wales is not even facing the Pacific, wouldn’t it be nice? To go and see?” 

He got up from the chair to get close to the wall, to the old newspapers and satellite pictures of sites thousands of kilometers away. Gansey stepped to the side to let him pass, almost weary of him, and of their dialogue.

“It’s just that…” Gansey started, turning to the side with a mindless brush of his right thumb on his lips, pensive. It was the first tic that ever filtered through his impeccable posture drenched in military rigor, and it immediately drove Henry’s attention away from the miscellanea in front of him. “Being _done_ seems to always be very, very far away. And I don’t...I don’t like to plan for being done.”

“But that’s what we’re here for, Gansey.” Henry insisted, getting one step closer, close enough that he could corner Gansey against the desk if he just dared a bit more. “Biting the bullet and the Jaeger handlers now, and build the life in which we won’t have to... _after_.”

In an uncharacteristic concession of physical closeness, Gansey didn’t move to the side but lowered the hand from his lips. He mouthed after to himself, as if trying to taste it. Henry’s heart drummed in his chest. 

“I think I’m going to think about it.” Gansey said, after a long silence, and it rather felt like a concession to himself. “Thank you for listening to my blabbering, Henry.”

When Gansey smiled, looking up, Henry suddenly realised that he hadn’t been reciprocating Henry’s gaze for a bit, now. Deep hazel eyes, so intent. 

Unable to hold himself back, Henry pressed forward, just like in the training ring. This time Gansey wasn’t on guard and he ended up looking up at Henry, so close, as if startled. Blue was much shorter, her breath would never brush against Henry’s face as Gansey’s did.

“Thank you for blabbering.” Henry inhaled subtly, until his ribcage gave in and actually expanded. “Goodnight, Gansey.”

He stepped out of Gansey’s personal space smoothly, and their arms brushed as Henry made to conquer the door. Putting distance between them felt like pulling a string after having weakly knotted it — some resistance, a friction, and then freedom without consequences. 

“Goodnight, Henry.” 

Gansey was smiling, polite and composed, but his eyes were still focused enough that Henry knew the place he tied the string on was still well within reach. Another thump, deep in his chest. He clicked his tongue with a wink, in a mock of a military salute, and pressed the exit button to sneak out of the room swiftly. 

The short trip to the end of the hallway wasn’t enough to detach himself from the whole ordeal. 

The lights of their room were already off and Blue was just an outline under the covers, lit just in passing by the hallway illumination that filtered through the open door, promptly disappearing at its closing. Moving in the dark, Henry closes himself into the ensuite bathroom, blinking owlish at the too bright light bumping off the white fixtures. Even getting ready for bed had a bitter aftertaste — he wanted to talk with Blue, he wanted them to share this, as they shared everything else for so many years. It was so hard, at times, to be patient. 

With the strength of many years of practice, he slid into bed beside Blue with minimum amount of disruption of cover, bedding, positions and sleep. 

Blue was sleeping on her side, facing away from Henry and curling on a corner of the pillow. Even in the darkness, Henry knew the curve of her neck, the way it led all the way to the space between her shoulder blades, jutting from the tank top of her pyjama. When he kissed on the vertebra that marked the end of her nape, her skin was warm from her own body heat, contained by the duvet. 

“You’re late,” she murmured, but let Henry press them together, chest to back, in a natural arrangement that required much more than scorn to be broken.

“I would have wanted you there. You would like him.” 

She already did, sort of, but that was the kind of bruise it was pointless to press on.

“I don’t want to like him any more than I have to,” another whisper in the night, at least recognising that they were going to be tied together, one way or another. It was probably better than nothing.

Henry sighed and kissed her again, and then another time when she tucked her chin lower. “You know less is more, in drifting. I don’t want you to have a hard time.”

“You’re just saying it because you like him.” It was a truth delivered with an edge of accusation, angled towards sulking.

“Yeah, but I like you too.”

No one was making him choose. He was literally following what had been pressed onto his hands, so he didn’t _have to_. But Blue was a convoluted and at times contrary creature, so her silence spoke for her displeasure, even while she snuggled closer to Henry’s chest. Henry caressed her with just the back of his fingers — over her arms, her hips, her belly, her collarbones — until they radiated the same warmth and their hearts beat at a similar speed, lulling them to sleep.

The following day marked the passing of their first week at the Hong Kong Shatterdome. True to form, Blue found a way to disappear from the changing rooms of the training grounds as soon as they were done with their morning routine. Henry sighed and went to lunch with Gansey, following him afterwards when he declared he wanted to go to the hangars before the meeting scheduled in the afternoon. However, as he seemed to already have a more than thorough debrief on the proceedings for the Jaeger the three of them were supposed to pilot, they ended up going to look for Greywaren. 

Being buffer zone between Gansey and Blue finally brought Henry to meet Colonel Ronan Lynch, the survivor. 

With the efforts for the merged Jaeger almost finalised, most of the Technical teams had been rerouted to the only other high-class weapon of the whole Pan Pacific Research Corps — not functional, but with hope to come back to be so.

“I don’t think they will let us in the lower decks, there are openings in the protective shell so you need both clearance and special protective gears to go down there.”

They turned on the first suspended metal bridge that marked edge of the hangar, and Greywaren dominated the scene. 

It was more impressive in reality; no Jaeger would ever deliver in video, photographs or blueprints — you just had to witness it, as Henry witnessed it. It was massive but tattered, its deep green chromature stained with black, burnt and crooked. There was a hole in its top covering, on the helmet, a blatant violation of the piloting safe haven. 

It made Henry deeply sick in his stomach — the notion of death, of rupture. 

It would have made sense, if Greywaren had been irreparably broken — if the only surviving pilot had been irreparably broken. But there was a faint glow coming from every point in which the fixtures of the protective shell had been moved. Staring at it too long made it look like something pulsing from the inside.

“Is it...lit up, somehow?” Henry asked, realising a second later that he probably interrupted Gansey in the course of a sentence he completely lost in his distraction.

“Oh, yes, that’s Greywaren for you. One of its kind, its energy source is unparalleled though quite hectic, but all the Mark-III generation...with Fox and Glendower as well...has this little quirk if you open them up too much.” 

Henry frowned. “So that’s why you said they took so long to swap the cores. Wouldn’t it be faster to make a new shell for Greywaren as well?”

A clang echoed throughout the hangar, like a hit on the metal fixtures of the walking bridge. When they both turned, Ronan Lynch’s armoured boot was still resting on the railing he had just kicked. He was sitting on the stairs going one floor down — barely past the point he was allowed, just enough to sound like a statement.

“You move it, you lose it, asshole,” Ronan growled, sparing a piercing look at Henry before turning towards Gansey. Cutting blue eyes in an equally cutting face, paradoxically unwelcoming in its attractiveness. “Who is this fucker and does he even have clearance to discuss Dreamcatcher?”

The accusation was clear, and it shook even Gansey out of the vague surprise. 

“This is my copilot, _Ronan_. Come and meet Henry Cheng” 

There was a weird inflection in the calling him by first name, one that could be pinned to long familiarity and Gansey’s experience in handling whatever hazardous material Ronan Lynch was made of. Henry had never seen them together before — had been _dying_ to, in some ways — and yet every analysis he could launch into halted brutally, with his mind limping after what Gansey had said.

His copilot. 

Easy and smooth and not up for questioning.

“I’ll meet your copilot after you fucking _drift_ with them.” Ronan’s disdain was obvious, and the fact that he got up made the move of staring Henry down head-to-toe even more obvious.

Henry was used to be taller than the average of a lot of rooms, but Ronan’s built was self-evident — in height and in physique, spotlessly trained and showcased by irreverent lack of uniform jacket. Henry was also used to not being immediately irked by other human beings, but Ronan seemed to be an urticant specimen.

“I’m sure it will happen any day, now. Do you want to delay the introduction to after we return to the base?” Henry did nothing to hide the undertone of you can wait for us there, even under the pointed stare from Gansey at the side of his skull.

“Fuck you,” Ronan countered, without even half attempt to finesse. “And don’t suggest opening up my Jaeger ever again.”

The smash of their shoulders together when Ronan pushed past Henry to walk away from the hangar spread like an ache, immediately. 

“Ronan, come on, wait a second, we even have a meeting in forty-five. And don’t tell me you didn’t get the memo!”

Ronan didn’t even turn around but still something in Gansey must persuade him to reply regardless. “Got nothing to talk about. I’m on hold.”

When the doors picked up the signal from Ronan’s dogs tag to let him out of the restricted zone, he didn’t hesitate and stormed out, without even waiting for an answer. 

“Oh, for the love of…” Gansey trailed off, rising a hand to pinch at the bridge of his nose, with a sigh. “I apologise, Henry, Ronan is not in his best disposition recently.. .and even if he were, he’s wary of strangers.”

“No, I…” Henry shook his head. “I’m sorry, too, I kind of took the bait, raised the stakes, jumped the gun and all that.” 

Gansey smiled at the rattling, and turned to look at Greywaren. “It’s tough for him, we’re not used to be...grounded. We started all the programs together, Ronan was the one who closed up my suit...and I closed his...when we first got cleared for live mission. It’s a long time and this is...it’s not how it was supposed to go, you know?”

Henry refrained very pointedly from interrupting the flow in any way. This sounded like another version of Welsh mythology — more like a personal mythology edition. 

Everyone knew the story of Colonels Richard Gansey III and Ronan Lynch, sons of the program founders, started training at ten years old with the Corps still in development, full operation rights by fifteen years old, saviours of the world by twenty years old. In the mammoth establishment that the Pan Pacific Defence Corps became, the core teams had never changed — up until now. It was still different to hear the same substance conveyed by the one who lived it and breathed it. 

“I think I don’t,” Henry had to admit. “And at the same time...I know how it is to get stranded on the way. I was in Manila, seven years ago, when the base was compromised and reshuffled. I don’t think I would have ever piloted, without Blue, and...I don’t envy him the loss, okay?”

When he stopped talking, Gansey was looking at him rather than at the hangar in full activity. 

“I think none of us...or no one sane in general...would.” There was a small twist on his lips, a failed smile full of a bitter grief. Then Gansey blinked and it subsided, and with a couple of seconds of silence came another pondering stare towards Henry. “You were in Manila before the decommission?”

“Yes, but at the time I had barely begun orientational training,” Henry replied, easily. In another occasion, he would have appreciated the curiosity paired with not having read his dossier front to back, for some pretence of privacy in a military base. But in this case, Gansey’s lack of misuse of his Colonel clearance didn’t seem to be the core of the issue.

“Can we talk about it? In another moment, with time, when you’re comfortable, I mean.”

It was Henry’s turn to smile, for the straight up approach mitigated in a rush after. Probably having to walk on eggs around Blue was pressing something in Gansey’s modes.

“Yeah, no worries, _Third_ ,” he joked, experimenting with nicknames and reactions out of a nervous habit. “I’m not sure what about, though.”

Gansey shook his head, apparently unfrazzled by being called funny. He made a sign towards the door of the hangar, gesturing at the clock of his pager. The meeting was getting close. “It’s a bit of a convoluted story, or it promises to be as soon as I gather all the information. There’s a lot on standby right now, I prefer to speak with more certainty.”

Henry lolled around in his steps with a great show of nonchalance. “I mean, I heard no less than eighteen Welsh names just yesterday. I think I can do convoluted.”

Gansey’s laughter was sudden and open. It lit up his awesome face and smoothened some of the traits of military poshness out. The thrill of it cursed through Henry in more than one way.

It was of some consolation when they got to the meeting and the show of Blue’s contrariness notched up another bit.

If this was an escalation, Henry wasn’t sure of how he was managing — getting better from one side and worse on the other — but he will have to do it regardless.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The designated military area for the Headquarter Shatterdome had the extension of a small town, grown to cover most of the Lantau Island between buildings, hangars, concrete trails and safe buffer zones. Even in the late night, it was constantly lit up, swallowing the sky in a purplish hue. Hong Kong, in the distance, shone brighter than the stars, closer and more obnoxious. It hadn’t been much different in Los Angeles, and yet somehow Blue still daydreamed of the day she would get to look up and get a faint grasp of the universe, rather than be anchored on this Earth in a constant state of alert.

After hours of roaming, it was the wind that brought her back inside, rising from the sea like a low hum expanding into a howl.

For no deeper reason than logistical closeness, she went back through the hangar in which she had started the afternoon. It was now evidently afterhours for the Tech Officers — at least the one not working overtime on the Greywaren’s reparations — and the hangar rang empty, resonating with the wind that shook it from the outside. Arriving from a lower level entrance meant, at the very least, that she didn’t have to face the judgement of the Frankenstein Jaeger that stood in the middle of it all — idle and waiting, reminding Blue how profoundly _not ready_ she was. 

Amidst the clicking and beeping of automatic machinery, the almost subdued sound of something dropping on the floor caught her attention. She frowned, walking towards the noise even in the deceptive echo of the hangar. Another _thud_ followed. 

Her approach and incremental correction of directions was halted when something rolled at her feet. It was one of the thermal shielding fills often used while working with Jaegers, thick with foam and valiantly resisting destruction. There must be thousands of them in each hangar, and if this was the source of the noise it was surely among the most innocuous ones possible. She bent and picked it up, taking a turn between two of the enormous pillars that held the corner of the building. 

Across them, a lone figure stood in a clearing, surrounded by clutter and backup supplies, with a metal tube longer than two meters to accompany. There was a moment of stillness and then sudden movement. Only three steps — sliding, spinning, landing — but the tube followed suit with ardor, gaining momentum before landing on yet another one of the thermal fillings. The impact was almost silent, dampened by the material, but the filling flew off and land a couple of meters to the left from Blue. 

_Thud_.

She took a step forward, and the movement seemed to attract the person’s attention.

It was a weird surprise — like finding an object in a context completely alien to its assuming purpose — to recognise Adam, looking back at her and just as startled. Barefoot, with only a black t-shirt and working trousers — plus a long tube gripped tight in his hands — he didn’t look like a mechanic. He looked like a pilot.

There was an awkward silence, Adam’s clear eyes staring at her in a frozen stillness, as if the moment could disappear by simply ignoring it.

“I believe this is yours,” Blue said, tossing Adam the filling she had picked up. 

Adam caught it one handed, and could not avert his gaze as he seemed sorely tempted to do. “I know it’s strange...but it’s not what it looks like.”

“And what does it look like?” She hopped on a stack of metal girder, sitting down in a clear indication that she wasn’t about to leave. Adam just shrugged, putting down the tube he had been using in lieu of a more traditional fighting stick, so she pressed on. “It’s okay if you’re trying to transfer to the pilot division, you could have told me...I mean, okay, I get that we only just met, but...I understand.”

Given Adam’s demeanor, almost guilty as if Blue had caught him in fault, she avoided stating some harsh but obvious truth. Most of all, that the program was winding down rather than upping the recruiting, considering that the Rim was now closed. There was also the non-trivial fact that beyond her and Henry there were other “lesser tier” pilots waiting in line, just in case — and while Adam’s form was far from terrible, he would be too old to start now. 

“I’m not.” Adam mumbled, after an uneasy silence. “I’m not trying to transfer. I was already transferred...from prospective Pilots to Tech division.”

“Oh.” Taken aback, she batted her eyelids. “I’m sorry, I…”

Adam gave her a sharp look, almost resentful — a borderline accusation that seemed to test her for pity, for contempt. But Blue felt none, and just lifted her chin back, until whatever spiked in Adam subsided. 

“No, it’s not your fault.” Adam himself admitted, going to sit at arm span from her as if to counter the tension. It was like being on a swing, but it fitted with Blue’s current mood so she was not going to judge. “It’s my fault. I’m...I’m a critical failure on the drifting tests.”

He didn’t elaborate further but the tone was enough to carry how critical the performance must have been. Blue could imagine the shock. The brief exposure to Adam told Blue that he would be fitting as a pilot — capable, controlled, a well-honed mind in a compliant body — but she knew better, in a lot of senses.

“I know you won’t believe it, when I say I understand. But I understand.”

Adam’s fair eyebrow scaled his forehead. “You’re a pilot. An operating pilot, appointed to a pioneering Mark-III team.”

“I can’t pilot without Henry.” She countered, sitting straight and lifting his eyebrows just as high. “And Henry can’t pilot without me. He’s drift unstable...for other types of fuck-ups that are not my story to tell...and I am...Let’s say I’m _drift compliant_ , that’s what they used to call me. A damn stabiliser, which of course can’t do no good by herself. So yes, Adam, I understand.”

It felt weird and at the same time liberating, to condense years of struggles and frustrations in something so simple. She didn’t need to share the doubt that maybe she wouldn’t have been sent away to Los Angeles if she had been a _worthy_ pilot, nor she had to question what would have been of her life if Henry hadn’t come around — full of potential but so hectic. She understood, and she could claim it as it was.

“And now you’re going to pilot the Mark-Fusion…”

“...with Colonel Richard Gansey III, posterboy to rule them all, case study of everything a pilot should be, _yes I know_. And no, I don’t know if it’s a brutal case of nepotism from my mother, okay?”

She said it all in one flow, and refused to stop, even though Adam lifted his hands as if in surrender, and didn’t even attempt to talk over her. 

“That’s really not what I meant, Blue.” He said, very carefully, after. His forehead was still creased but rather than incredulity he seemed to be concentrated on a puzzle. “I don’t think it’s nepotism, I think...I think it’s an interesting choice.”

“To chain two lead balls at _Wonderous Gansey_ ’s ankles and see him fly regardless? For sure.”

Adam sighed, deeply. “Richard Gansey is not _flying_ anywhere. He has been compromised in the Doomsday Mission, some say his sister took the physical tool and he took the mental one.”

That halted Blue’s rage from charging up even further. She had seen Helen, of course — prosthetics, slow-healing scars and all — but Gansey had seemed fine. Possibly the only one left standing, after the incident with Greywaren. 

“I didn’t...what happened?”

“You haven’t asked?”

She hadn’t, because she didn’t want to, and because assuming things came charged with a meaning was usually source of disappointment in a world that followed the rule of _adapt to the flow or perish_. She hadn’t, and she didn’t even know if Henry had, after taking up the duty of figuring things up for the both of them. She hadn’t, and her silence spoke for herself. 

“This Shatterdome it’s a bit of a mess now. A bit of _a lot_ of a mess.” Adam admitted, with the hushed tone of someone who didn’t want to spread gossip but was still acutely aware of his surroundings. “Usually Boyd, our chief, says that the messiest point is the one with the best possibilities.”

Blue held her head between the palm of her hands, pressing down on her temples. “Okay, yeah, I think I just made a show of _messy_ with you. I didn’t mean to be an ass.”

Adam gave a small shrug, but grinned a bit. “It’s not usual to have a pilot telling your that they are being an ass.”

“That’s because we’re a whole team of asses, then.” Blue declared, jumping off the girders. “I’ll talk with him, I knew I should have done it before.”

Adam, still seated, looked less like he was going to bury himself on the spot but also weirdly alone, dissociated from the flow of event he had just inadvertently kicked into action.

“And Adam,” Blue called, even while walking away, “you should come to the training grounds. Because you’re good, we’re asses, and the mess has possibilities.” 

Adam blinked, taken aback by the explicit invitation. She didn’t linger to force him to a reply on the spot, and went to run on this sudden instinct before second-guessing could push her into a frustrated stagnation again.

By the time she reached the door marked with Gansey’s serial number the digital clock on her pager read 01:26. The lights in the corridors were dimmed all over the core of the base, only picking up brightness at her passage. 

She tapped her own dog tags by the reader, which of course was not encoded to just open the doors for her, but it should get the rightful owner to open the door. Even in the weird mixture of guilt and blind charge that speaking with Adam had compelled, there was a hint of mean satisfaction in thinking of Gansey getting kicked out of bed by her request to enter.

When the door actually opened, it was abundantly clear that her mental picture had been true. Gansey stood disheveled and surprised, in a pyjama that recalled the typical idea of posh private school — with checked trousers and a plain t-shirt with a logo. There were so many things that could be ridiculous about the whole thing, but the most unfair one was how hard the little twist hit Blue herself. He was so different, out of his uniform, soft with sleep — so vulnerable, so _attractive_. 

And yet, on the wave of the same thought, if this was the only vulnerability Blue was ever going to win, she would crash through it until the aim was reached.

“I want to talk. I want us to talk.” Blue interjected, before Gansey could deliver some inane sentence. “I need to know about Doomsday, and where you stand, or I just can’t.”

It was immediately clear that the first sentence had been a good pierce, but the second one made Gansey recoil. “We surely should, but this hardly seems the right setting…”

“Spare me, damn you,” Blue uttered, and took the only advantage of her shortness to sneak beside Gansey — insinuating in the doorframe to win herself a space in Gansey’s room. 

The fact that he could have tackled her out — with that span of shoulders and his perfect stance — didn’t escape her, but he didn’t. He let her barge inside, and ran just one hand over his face before tiptoeing to close the communication door that presumably connected his room to Helen’s — open without limitations. When the main and inner doors had slid close, the room felt more oppressive, enclosing them. The shadows were thick at the corners and the clutter on the walls jumped out, encompassing but indistinct. With the lights still in night-mode, the unmade bed in the corner felt weirdly intimate, even more so when Gansey stood beside it, barefooted. 

“This is a bit sudden, Jane.” He ran a hand through his hair, without actually fixing anything. “What do you mean you want to talk about Doomsday?”

Blue gritted his teeth against the name — nickname — that still stuck. “Exactly what I said. I want to know what went down and I want to know what it means for _you_.”

“That’s…”

“Don’t you _dare_ say it’s _classified_ or I swear you won’t know what hit you,” she hissed, getting a step closer. “I’m gonna catch it from your brain. The moment you try to drift with me, I’ll know. And when you do, you’d better not surprise me with the truth of how _Persephone died_ while you, all of you, came back alive…”

She choked off, feeling unhinged. This was more than she meant to say — more than she ever wanted to admit — and yet she had, under Gansey’s eyes looking at her without ever wandering. 

“It’s not classified. For you.” Gansey whispered, after a long second. “So I assumed you already knew and...blame me, and everything. But…” he trailed off, too.

“But instead I have to ask. Like you had to ask us our names, all blind spots and tricks. I just…” she stuttered off, lacking something more eloquent and more contained to cover up what she had already admitted. 

“Our head of Research, Development and Implementation — Artemus Elintes, before Declan Lynch — had been working for ages in getting us a final solution.” Gansey started, out of nowhere, and only now he averted his gaze. “So we ended up down there, in the Ocean, and it was pretty clear we hit a mark because we never had that many Kaijus...that fast...We had to go close, because Artemus said that Greywaren’s warping could trick the force field. Ronan and Niall had a whole bomb with them...the kind you want to detonate inside the Rim, not outside. So it’s just…”

“How many?” Blue asked, while Gansey left his own bedside to roam through the room like an animal in a cage. 

“Two, at the beginning. Then three. Then four just as we were so close to bring two down...not that we didn’t, we brought them down, but the fourth...the fourth felt like the last stand, and of course it was going for Greywaren so we went for direct cover...me and Helen, I mean.”

There was a peculiar juxtaposition between Gansey’s impeccable military posture — straight back, chin well-angled, his arms that tended to go in rest behind his back while he talked — and the incremental unwinding of his words. 

Something in Blue’s mind nagged her. Maybe she didn’t know what she unleashed, she didn’t know what she was asking — but she could not stop, not in front of a first-hand account of Doomsday, the least-documented operation in the story of the Corps. 

“It was weird, okay?” Gansey went on, unprompted, this time. “That Kaiju was weird, and when it latched onto us we didn’t even figured that there was a contamination...but then we felt the contamination. What do you even want to know?”

The tone was more haunted than really accusatory. Blue pressed on. “What contamination?”

“Of the drift. Through the drift.” Gansey stood in front of his own papers on the walls, and yet kept talking. “You know when you’re having a nightmare, and the dream is falling apart, and you know it doesn’t make sense but it just won’t rationalise with you? It’ll keep going and it’ll drag you down as well? That’s...that’s it...sort of...I couldn’t pinpoint myself, it was distorting Helen in my mind…”

_This is too much_ , guilt whispered in Blue’s mind. But guilt had forced Gansey to start replying, or so it seemed, and now he didn’t seem capable of stopping.

“I just...you have to understand, we weren’t trying to win that. Okay? We weren’t trying to win it. We were there to close the Rim...Greywaren barging through, us and Fox trying to keep it from getting engaged...we weren’t the one that needed to win, we just had to engage long enough for the final shot. Then _boom_. Then done.”

He said done with a weird undertone of craving — a relief just within reach, a blessing that had been denied. 

“We’ve always been so good at holding the line, Helen and I,” Gansey trailed off, tapping his fingers on a random schematic on the wall that seemed to have a weight in the argument, for him. “For the centre to stay intact someone needs to keep it that way, obviously. So we hold the line...and hold the centre...I’m...I think we were failing. I’m a bit confused, I’m not trying to _bullshit you_ , it’s just very confused. It’s so confused that I think we were failing.”

The profanity was sudden, out of place in Gansey’s refined accent, like the filter of someone else, or a quote, that Blue wasn’t in the loop enough to catch.

“So Fox came in support?” Blue whispered, getting close reflexively. 

“They came in support. And the Kaiju took them as well...more food must have been a distraction, it was a bit slower in consuming us.” There was a dark, hysterical irony in the choice of words. Gansey looked at her, with something glazed in his eyes, and then he bolted again, restless. “I remember them in the comm...they said... _we’re three, it’s always better in threes_...and I almost thought we could make it, that Greywaren would fight its way as close as possible and we could make it. I thought...it’s just in the mind...but it went so deep in the drift, the contamination, that it got to _us_. It got to Helen. Even with Fox helping.”

It was far from an eloquent narration, scattered and incrementally jumpy in the tone, but Blue still listened, and listened, and couldn’t shake the spreading feeling that Doomsday had been a cruel forecast as a mission designation. 

“I think Fox snatched as much as they could, from us. But again...hold the line, we weren’t trying to win this. I wasn’t…” Gansey trailed off, again, and pressed his back on the wall. “We didn’t have a plan...but I could feel the plan. We go down one by one...the last two pilots standing for each Jaeger trigger the self-destruct...or sacrifice one Jaeger, if Greywaren still needs a bit, and it’s just the last one that detonates the Kaiju, because you know...no latching on Greywaren allowed. Keep it engaged. I know it sounds so long but you know it’s never long, right? Battles are short.”

Blue knew and yet she didn’t. Not like this, with this strength and resignation at the same time. And sensing the tactical reasoning of the plan didn’t quench the deep nausea in her stomach. She knew what was coming, and didn’t.

“So...keep it engaged. And don’t do our same mistake. I think Persephone chose to subsection Fox...because they were three, you know, better balance. And Calla was next in line. I couldn’t subsection Helen, we were so compromised already. So she took the blunt end...mental, physical...consuming. But we held it. I swear to God, we held it.”

Blue wanted to yell him to stop, to know show her a plan where she had just expected a brutal miscalculation, an accident, sloppiness. But her jaw was glued shut and she just couldn’t.

“And then...Greywaren crashed through the outer barrier and...they warped the bomb in. Persephone saw it, she felt it, I swear she was still there with us when we got it. I swear she was there to see it. I swear.”

Persephone had been there and then she wasn’t. They had won, six out of seven when the conservative plan had been closer to _zero out of seven_. And Persephone was gone.

“I know we could have done better. You’re gonna see it, so you’ll know too. I know it. I wasn’t even the one that helped everyone back out, after the Kaiju crumbled by itself with the explosion. Maura and Calla still helped us...while we waited, Ronan and Niall were still MIA...They helped us, they helped me cut Helen’s arm off, off the connectors and the damaged drift. They helped me to step away, it felt like I was ripping...you’re gonna see it, you’re gonna know, and you’re gonna _feel it_.”

The sound of these words pooled into Blue’s guts, viscous like bitumen and just as sickenly hot. 

It occurred to her after an embarrassingly long moment that Gansey was crying, with a composed quietness interspersed by heaving breaths.

“I do apologise,” Gansey whispered, cracking at some point around the g, but still displaying military rigor. “This is a very improper mission report.”

By the time Blue got closer in an instinctive rush, another wave of tears had already broken through. 

For someone so well-trained, it was remarkably easy to guide Gansey to sit down on his own bed. She kneeled at his feet, resting her forearms against his legs, and claimed Gansey’s hands in her own grip. He had the same hands of her mother, with scars running deep at the base of each finger and at the spot where his palm met the wrist — high-class pilot hands, scarred by the drift connectors. The dismayed sobs struggled to stop but Gansey still twined his fingers with Blue’s, slow and almost stupified by the gesture. 

“I was a very demanding and improper copilot,” Blue murmured. She wanted to apologise and yet she couldn’t — because she wanted to know, and somehow only this felt like knowing. Hurting, and knowing. 

“I’ll understand, if you call for an halt. You know it, right? I don’t...I’m really compromised, Jane.” The struggle for control was the source of some evident frustration, flushing even Gansey’s tanned skin with patches of red. 

“You still want to pilot?” She asked, instead.

“We’re not done. We’re so not done. Niall is dead and we were supposed to be done. I want to be done, and I want to be on a Jaeger and make it done.” A vibrant obsession coursed through his shaking words. 

Blue felt like a child in comparison: less duty, less compulsion, less horror to shoulder. She recovered a hand from Gansey’s grip and went to stroke his cheek, almost roughly against the half-dried tears. 

“I really want to be done, too.” She confessed, keeping at bay the inherent shame of a will coming from a different standing. “I’ll make you able to pilot, Gansey. That’s what I do, that’s what I think I can do. I’ll take this mess and straighten it up...if you trust me with it.”

Gansey gave a broken bubbly laughter and tilted his head towards Blue’s hand.

“Well, I’m rather inclined to think you really _can_.”

“ _Rather inclined_ , who even talks like this?”

Another laughter, a bit less unhinged. “You can team up with Ronan on this one. But you’ll still be my copilot otherwise, won’t you?”

It was intense, to hear him _asking_. She had been completely sure that Colonel Richard Gansey III would never in his life bother to ask anything, just order and expect execution — but that was likely an unfair assessment, for _just-Gansey_. 

“I will be your copilot.”

Something unwound in the tension that had permeated the room — in the grief, and uncertainty — at the resolution. 

It was easier, so much easier, after that, to climb up from the floor and sit next to Gansey on his unmade bed, the same bed Blue snatched him from.

She let him calm down, and slid his head forcibly against her shoulder when he caught him rubbing on his temples for the fourth time. 

He briefly muttered about a headache, about how common they were and how his brain would just scatter at times — after the final mission, after the contamination. She whispered in turn, in a weird echo to what she had said earlier to Adam, about how she was useless alone but a spotless stabiliser. Henry must have already told him something, because Gansey had half a grasp on Manila, and on how she and Henry needed each other.

They could find a way to fit in three as they had fitted in two, she supposed.

The silence that followed was different from the one that had ensued when Blue had first barged in. Shoulder to shoulder with their backs against the wall, she was intricately aware of Gansey’s warmth beside her, of the way the mattress dipped under his weight. He didn’t feel real, and yet he made her chest heaved and lightened at the same time. 

A low ping startled Gansey more than her, he scrambled to check his pager on the bedside table before Blue could stop her.

“It’s mine,” she reassured him, acutely aware that she probably never experienced the alert of getting called in the middle of the night like Gansey had, as the front line of resistance against the Kaijus. 

_U not comng bk?_

Henry had made the best of the fifteen characters allowed in the pager. She should have warned him before and she knew it. Apparently, by this time at night, she knew a whole lot of things.

“Henry is worried...understandably.”

Going back was the most obvious choice, and yet she found herself reluctant to just get up and go — after the content and tone of the conversation, after how much time it took her to get here. Gansey was still _unfocused_ , for lack of better term — and she had pushed him towards this.

“Maybe he can come over,” Gansey said, before she could resolve that leaving him to sleep would be for the best after all. “There must come the day in which we are all in the same room and actually interacting.”

“Wow, rude,” she grumbled, but she sank back against the wall, without putting any distance between them.

_@Gansey C’movr._

She could have used a chronometer for a 100-meters dash to time how long it took for the door to signal a newcomer waiting outside, after she sent the message. 

“This was fast,” Blue commented, as Gansey got up to open the door.

“He must have thought you were killing me,” Gansey mused in return, in full hearing range of Henry since the door was already sliding open.

“Well, every other interpretation is clearly unbelievable.” Henry didn’t even bother for pleasantries, coming in from beside Gansey. 

His dark eyes scrutinised the both of them, and Blue could imagine the inventory: Gansey’s red and tired eyes, Blue sitting on his bed and probably looking as defeated as she felt. 

Henry was in a plain white t-shirt and dark sweatpants and he and Gansey side by side made an excellent case for fully-casual-downright-sloppy attires, but that wasn’t much of a consolation in the big picture.

“I swear we just talked...so maybe tomorrow it will rain in purple, I don’t know.” The joke was good-natured, even while Gansey refrained to go back to sitting on the bed and leaned against his own desk. “I suppose I should fill you in, it’s a bit of a convoluted discussion but I’m sure we can summarise it appropriately…”

After all the years they spent together, Blue didn’t need an active drift connection to read some serious judgment in how Henry lifted his eyebrow. It sounded like a heavy discussion because it had been, and it weighed on Gansey even through the relief of having settled some friction with his copilots. 

“I’ll hear about it later, one way or another. We ride hard and fast in this clique, I’ll roll with the surprise.” Henry promptly recovered his quirky humour, reaching over to get an arm around Gansey’s shoulders and drag him forward. “As a contribution to the team, how about you roll into bed, in all your Richardness?”

Gansey made a bit of a face but let himself be walked back to his own bed. “When Ronan comments on my Richardness it’s usually an overture to tell me I’m a dick.” 

Blue had never heard Gansey sharing things about himself and people in his life so casually. But on the other hand, she had never heard him speak _casually_ to begin with, so far. She gave a bit of an incredulous laughter. Henry must have been more used to it because he just snickered, and encouraged Gansey to flop back on the mattress. 

“You know I’m not an expert of Richardness, I’m afraid you’ll have to educate me more. And I suppose Blue will be eager to hear about your Shakespeare-adjacent stuff.”

“I’ll hear about the Shakespeare-adjacent stuff,” Blue confirmed, with a small smile. 

“She’ll hear about it! Rejoice!” Henry chirped, tuning down with a low whoopsie only when Blue swatted on his arm in warning to keep his tone night-appropriate.

Slouching on the bed, Gansey seemed somewhat overwhelmed, and yet relaxing in a banter he was suddenly involved in.

“I’m glad you two talked.” Henry whispered, with less theatricals and more seriousness. 

Henry sat on the bed as well, halfway between Blue and Gansey, and leaned forward towards Blue with the smooth demeanor that came with long familiarity. When he kissed her, it was as natural as usual, with his head tilted just so, the two of them meeting halfway with no clattering and no uncertainty. It was simply contact and affection, dotted with something that Blue chose to interpret as relief, or maybe pride. She closed her eyes and let the kiss deepen, just a bit, just to feel as if she had an anchor even after swaying with the strength of Gansey’s recollection.

When she opened her eyes again, Henry was retreating and Gansey was looking at the two of them with rapture, as if witnessing something rare and impalpable. 

“You should sleep,” Henry pointed out, pushing Gansey down on his own pillows with ease. “We should really train tomorrow.”

“We really should.” Gansey grinned at the prospect, with his eyes following Blue’s movements to get off the bed with more intent than she would have thought possible.

“Oh, we’re gonna need so much coffee, I’m really not built for military black coffee,” Henry lamented, with a hard-suffering sigh as if he were an expert of coffee in the days with no rationing, which of course he wasn’t.

The easy flow of his blabbering fitted perfectly with him leaning with a hand on the pillow beside Gansey’s face and leaning down to kiss him on the lips as well. 

It was just a peck, at first, with Henry drawing back to toss the covers over Gansey with his free hand. He didn’t really moved away, though. Gansey raised a hand to wrap it around Henry’s wrist, and Henry’s back raised with a small inhale. When he bent over again, they kissed as if diving in the experience. 

Together, they painted a picture that Blue very much enjoyed watching — both unrefined by having been woken up, tall and solid and yet so considerate with each other. Gansey dropped his mouth open almost in a sigh and with a small tilt of his head Henry deepened the kiss. Blue could catch the suggestion of his tongue tracing Gansey’s bottom lips before sliding to full contact. Nothing was hard in this, just very much _present_ — tongue and lips more tongue and then two small peckings before retreating all together. 

They should kiss more often, Blue assessed, in the relative privacy of her brain.

Henry reached over and Blue took his hand with ease, turning towards the door. They bid Gansey goodnight and left, even though it was tempting to stay and check that he actually slept. 

When the door slid close behind them, leaving them in the corridor, the last glimpse they got was of Gansey, a figure almost indistinct in the dimmed light of the room, still watching them with heavy-lidded eyes.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 3 will be out on **Saturday May 18th**
> 
> In the meantime, find me on [my Tumblr](http://seekthemist.tumblr.com), where I've also been going on a bit of a ficlet spree to cure me from the stress of the Big Bang!


	4. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In Chapter 3, we've got all the meat on the grill stuff starts to Get Hectic. Also, I would like to remind you that that threesome relationship tag and the Explicit Sexual Content thing are not there just because, ifyouknowwhatimean.
> 
> Multiple POVs, as usual, and some (((Pacific Rim Theme))) playing. 
> 
> Thank you for being here with me, and as usual please enjoy!

  
[[[ [Poster art to set the mood for this chapter provided by the awesome Rachel (purrsnicket)!](https://purrsnicket.tumblr.com/post/184967136400/have-you-ever-heard-of-anything-better-than-a-trc) ]]]  


  
  
  


The floor of the training rooms was a composite of textures, marking the passage from on area to another. Smooth wooden surface for the one-on-one matches, straight-out mattresses under the suspension equipment, bumpy foam for the free body exercising, and so on and so forth. Ronan knew his way through each of them, even literally blindfolded as a legacy of his father’s _fancy routines_. Some days it was a blessing, other days, it was a curse, and overall Ronan was never fond to try and figure out which day was it going to be in the face of strangers. So he only frequented the rooms before dawn, or late at night, two times that could easily overlap depending on how you looked at the clock. 

But today Gansey had asked, so Ronan had waited for seven o’clock to meet — like in the old days, the training room for themselves, arriving together. 

Sitting down on the far right section, where tatami boards crossed over on the floor, he pressed his legs outwards, feeling the burn as Gansey’s tried to press them inwards in turn. Active and engaged, and with a metronome clicking the rhythm to the side. 

_Tick._

He leaned backwards, the ceiling above a bare concrete sheet crossed only by thick cables sending outrageous amount of power throughout the Shatterdome.

_Tock._

He pushed himself up until his chest was pressing on his legs, his hands clammy where the fingers crossed on his nape. And Gansey, on the other side of his knees, was very close to his face, with a layer of sweat on his forehead — exactly the same Ronan could sense on his own.

_Tick._

Down again.

It was better, with a rhythm, with a known routine, just him and Gansey doing sit-ups with their legs crossed together to hold the position steady. A familiar heat and a familiar face coming up to meet him every time. It wasn’t his father’s, but he and Gansey had been doing this since they were ten years old — eleven years in four months and nine days — ramping up to all the challenges posed in front of them. Through the burn of his body and the sound of their synched breaths, Ronan almost felt like he could do this.

Tock. Tick — Tock. __

“Have you been sleeping, recently?”

“Yeah, like a fucking baby.”

“Ronan…”

“Do I look like I’m crumbling the hell down?”

Gansey’s face, when it appeared on their way up, sported a monumental frown. Evidently abs and legs work wasn’t exactly enough to qualify as _fit for purpose_ in his books.

“Don’t look at me like a goddamn grandma,” Ronan huffed, sliding back down. Then back up. “I’m not even on active duty.”

It stung, it always did, because it carried the weight of knowing that not only he wasn’t on duty— he didn’t know when, or if, or how, he would be again. _Fit for purpose_ was a concept that very much required a purpose.

“Compelling argument,” Gansey mocked him, but his eyes saw right through Ronan when he came back up. 

“I know, I’m a fucking _orator_.” Ronan sighed to the ceiling, again. “When is Helen coming?”

That was the second promise that lured him out of his usual avoidant schedule. It went without questioning that if Ronan asked Gansey for help to deal with something, Helen would probably help out — unless it was specifically requested that they manage it by themselves for some training assignment. 

_Noah Czerny_ was far from an assignment. He looked much more like a mystery. 

“I don’t know, thirty?” Gansey made a valiant attempt to gesture towards the clock at the side of the room without breaking posture. “I was talking with the Chief Tech, the other day. Greywaren should be fixed in a couple of weeks.”

Ronan snarked at Gansey’s stubbornness, and had to refrain headbutting him when they came up again. They could have changed the subject but God forbid he didn’t have to say it. “It doesn’t fucking matter and _you know it_.”

“It does matter, we’re pilots,” Gansey countered, out of breath and outraged at the same time. “And I think you’re approaching this thing the wrong way around.”

“Try to tell me there’s a _right_ way around, _Dick_ , and I’ll fucking strangle you.”

“Jesus, Ronan…”

The metronome — a digital appliance fixed in the training room, one of the many — stopped with a long beep at the count of three hundred. They both flopped down on their back with the same rhythm they had followed so far, but they didn’t lift up again. Ronan’s muscles tingled with heat in a steady line from his arms and shoulders, his stomach, all the way to his calves and ankles that were still crossed with Gansey’s. He stared at the ceiling and let his throat tremble with his laboured breath. 

“I just meant...operatively speaking. You think I was joking? Mocking you? When we spoke, I mean. I do want to finish it. And we’ll finish it together.” Gansey spoke from outside of Ronan’s field of vision, breaking the sacred rule of _just breathe while decompressing_.

“Yeah, doesn’t that sound fucking _amazing_.” It was difficult to hide the bitterness. 

Gansey had always been good at being uplifting in dire times, but not even him could change reality. And the reality had hit Ronan in the weeks over weeks he was left to stew and wait — wait for analysis of what happened on that damned isle, wait for intel on the mysterious apparition, wait for Greywaren to be fixed. The more he waited the more he became apparent that maybe there was nothing to wait for. This was probably a dead end, dead in every sense, and one he would not be able to pilot his way out from — because he couldn’t pilot anymore. 

“Ronan, you piloted Greywaren alone, okay? _Alone_. The whole Jaeger program is based on the fact that you need multiple people and you did it alone.” The tone was the same damn one that Ronan had heard Gansey use with members of the Headquarter when even the walls of the base had thought humanity was going to end. “So maybe you need so little, just so little, to be able to stand again.”

Ronan ran the back of a hand through the cooling sweat on his forehead. “Yeah, I did, and it’s a fucking nightmare, Gansey, not a Spa trip to suggest to posh little friends for Spring Break or whatever the hell,” he grumbled. Not having to look at Gansey, but feeling him physically, gave a weird balance to the conversation. “I’m not gonna stick someone random with 40% of drifting harmonics in Greywaren, just so that we can move it. And I really hope this is not what you’re doing with Glendower or I’ll come and smash your head against it.”

“That’s not what I’m suggesting, it’s just that you don’t need the 99% Lynch Show or nothing,” Gansey said, somewhat subdued. Niall Lynch was gone, and with him missing the Lynch Show — the one that made Niall Lynch co-creator and test subject, and the duo with his son almost a case study — was lost forever. “And I’m not putting anything in Glendower. I won’t have Glendower anymore...but I will have a new team.”

“So they will serve the purpose because you want the purpose?” 

Ronan felt bitter, sounded bitter, and he knew it but he couldn’t avoid it. Ronan has always had the perception that he would do things because he wanted them — it was impossible to think of something Niall deliberated that Ronan had seen as an unworthy cause. Gansey, from Ronan’s eyes, had always been capable of doing what he _had to_. Responsibility for the responsibility’s sake. 

At this, and only at this, Gansey untangled and got up. There was something intense in his eyes, when he looked down on Ronan while standing. He was crossed, but also tangled in the conversation enough that maybe he won’t address this thing with one of his patented Ronans.

“I think that sometimes you don’t stumble into a situation with all the pieces already provided, like a big design.” Gansey said, after a long silence. He reached over, in an offering, and pulled up Ronan with it when their hands clasped together. “Sometimes there are people in your path and how you tangle with them it’s a choice. It’s half-chance, half-choice, and those are the only things I’m _using_ at the moment.”

He didn’t had to stress on whether or not he had made himself clear. Ronan was perfectly able to catch him drawing a line between what could be questioned and what couldn’t. It wasn’t an unknown rule, after all, that you don’t debate of people’s copilot. It was ruder and more foolish than trying to question on someone’s bones. 

But this, too, made Ronan bitter, so he stayed silent. 

“I would really like you to meet my copilots, Ronan. Properly, I mean,” Gansey murmured, without letting go of Ronan’s hand just yet.

It was Ronan himself who disentangled. “I said it already. I’ll _meet your copilots_ when you actually have _copilots_ to introduce me.”

Which was a silly excuse for avoidance, but it was worth the glory of forcing Gansey to step into the grit reality and try and see, beyond theory and nice words, how it was to drift with someone’s different from Helen. 

The sliding doors of the training room opened before Gansey could muster a reply, leaving way to Helen herself. 

“Are you two just lazing around?” she called over, in lieu of a greeting.

“No, absolutely, we were just about to get to the rowing machine,” Gansey scrambled to reply — a weird habit ingrained in too many years under Helen’s wing in a military base. 

Ronan rolled his eyes but still followed Gansey around, while Helen took off her shoes by the entrance. A nagging part of Ronan’s head — at time exasperated with everything and anything, including itself — marked his own judging as foolish. Maybe if Niall had ever had the same disposition as Helen, Ronan would have behaved the same way. Instead, Niall had always been Niall, and Ronan lost track of his own thoughts while reconstructing second by second what his father would have done, faced with the same situation. 

Drifting sometimes had the quality of a curse for the livings, but no one had ever provided warnings on how the same curse would morph towards the deads. Ronan’s mental projections on Niall’s actions, reactions and thoughts could be precise to the millisecond. He had lost his father while they were getting close to six years of continuous drifting — he had known, he knew, he would always know. And yet it didn’t matter, because no hyper-detailed fantasy would ever overcome the fact that outside of Ronan’s head Niall was gone.

“Ronan,” Helen called over, and by the tone of it must have not been the first time. 

Ronan snapped back into attention with a reflexive “Ma’am, yes, ma’am.” Yet another thing to kick himself over, because the look of both Gansey brothers was a mirroring example of frowny concern. They both knew the only thing — the only person — that could ever get Ronan in perfect military shape. It wasn’t either of them, and it would never be among them anymore. 

“I was just confirming to Gansey that we have an estimate of fourteen days to full operative conditions for Greywaren.” She repeated, as if she hadn’t caught Ronan in the thornes of his own mind. “Apart from that, this one Noah Czerny is really testing my capabilities.”

“Your capabilities? You have so much access that you should be able to know how many times the commanding bridge does the laundry.” Ronan pointed out.

He went to sit at the rowing machine, once again specular to Gansey. Most of the training routines and the equipments were meant to be used as a pair, for obvious reasons, even when under normal conditions they would be a one-man business. This was the case of the rowing machine, very literal in its purpose even though none of them had ever sat on a boat. But the movements required echoed the multiple efforts required for the piloting of a Jaeger, even more so while mirroring another person. The habit was strong in this as well — comforting and grounding — and Ronan could feel it from the very first stroke he and Gansey gave, crossing their arms while pulling at the strings and sliding close to each other. Ronan could look at him right in the eyes, like this, firm and square regardless of any controversy. Then they exhaled, in synch, and pushed apart neatly. 

Helen set up their metronome again. “Thank you for the trust, Ronan, but the General is still my mother. What I can tell you for sure is that Noah Czerny is not a current operative...not that the thing you described would work so smoothly even if he were.”

Push. Pull. Push. Pull. 

Ronan glared with a hint of distrust. “It’s still what fucking happened. I’m not gonna sell a nice lie for the sake of convenience.”

Gansey huffed more deeply than needed and Helen echoed him while leaning against one of the pillars of the room. “Brilliant, then also be _fucking patient_ when the answers don’t come raining.” The echoing of Ronan’s crassness came almost weird, from Helen’s spotless diction. “We’re already under so many spotlights, with the U.N. and the spending reviews and whatever. I’m not keen on muddying the pond by stomping in it.”

“Can’t we get something through _Mummy dearest_ ’s clearance, somehow?” Ronan bit through clenched teeth. It was a harsh training routine, having a conversation through it was better for his debatable peace of mind but worse for his pectorals — according to the muscles themselves. 

“Are you out of your mind?” Gansey countered immediately. He had always been better than Ronan with this — smoother in the movements, better distributed. 

“We’re not going to involve our mother in this unless you’re very keen on, first, getting an interrogation and a mental evaluation that will keep you in lockdown for months, second, having this matter snatched completely out of our hands.” Helen listed it on the fingers of her prosthetic hand, always stubbornly making use of it to force the neural connections to stay responsive. For the second time in thirty minutes, through another Gansey, the _am I making myself clear_? went without saying. 

“Okay, fine,” Ronan gritted out, without elaborating further.

“We all want to get this done. It’s just...it’s worth doing it carefully,” Gansey huffed, sliding closer to him and then away again. 

“I said okay, I get it. We’re going _nowhere_ so far but I fucking _get it_.” 

He almost lost his rhythm with Gansey, in the frustrated rage that overwhelmed him. The beeping of the metronome signalling the end of the count to a hundred and fifty was like the saving gong in a losing match. 

“I’m trying to explore wider searches...within reason and _properly_ , of course. I think there might be something connected with the Manila Shatterdome, but I’m not sure if it’s really something or I’m just getting mislead by general classified stuff.” Helen added, after some long second of tense silence broken just by Ronan and Gansey’s laboured breaths. 

“Manila?” Gansey piped up, with a small frown. He unbuckled his feet from the machine and this time, since Ronan got to his own feet sooner, it was Gansey who accepted a hand up this time. “Henry was in Manila. I mean, it was years ago, but still…”

Ronan snatched his hand away, pointedly, and got to grab two towels. Tossing one straight to Gansey’s face was of some satisfaction. “No all-powerful mother, no potentially useless stranger that literally just arrived.”

“The moment we drift he’s going to know... _they_ are going to know. I hope you’re not suggesting…”

“The moment they manage to _hold_ a full, stable, operative drift with you, Gansey, _then_ we’ll see what the fuck I’m suggesting, mh?” 

The tension spiked again, and then somewhat cracked when the training room doors slid open again. This time, however, Ronan hadn’t expected the arrival — even more so when the arrival brought in Henry Cheng and Blue Sargent, evoked like a bad omen just by citing them too much.

“Fucking hell,” Ronan growled under his breath, and abandoned the training floor before Gansey could try and manhandle him into pleasantries with his new social projects. 

He could feel Gansey’s eyes following him, reproachful, but he still made his way up the step of the single bleacher that occupied one of the sides of the room. When the training corps for new pilots had been in full operational, an entire class of recruits might fit here — sometimes to watch at the experienced pilots, other times to wait for their turns in the drills. Now they were just empty, and a perfect spot for Ronan to perch over and make the contradictory point of not leaving the room but not engaging with it at the same time. 

Gansey knew him too well to think about following him. Or maybe the compulsion to pour his attentions on the newcomers was just too strong. 

At the beginning, at least the girl hadn’t been interacting with him more than she had to — Ronan knew it from watching from afar, and Helen had confirmed. But now even that obstacle seemed to be done and over with, the many miracles of Gansey’s charm. They were all acting so earnestly towards each other it was kind of disgusting to watch. 

There was no attempt at pretending not to notice Ronan, but Ronan himself made a big show of looking over the training stats on one the the provided tablets, and that seemed to be enough to rein in their curiosity. The section of Ronan’s mind that lived in constant flames almost longed for alternatives where they would initiate contact, and Ronan would fuck shit up spectacularly. In the background of those same flames, however, he wasn’t willing to make it look like an ultimatum for Gansey — _him or them_ — especially not if the outcome was so uncertain. 

“I understand you’re skeptical, but I don’t find them just so outrageous, come on.”

For the second time in a hour, Helen startled Ronan out of his thoughts. 

“Bullshit, you probably vetted them and then tossed them to Gansey as...I don’t know, enrichment toys?”

Sometimes it did feel that way — like they were all carnivorous, wild animals locked in a cage, entertained just enough to avoid them ripping their own flash out. Ronan felt it more, without Niall to draw the lines and making Ronan tiptoe along them.

“It was mostly Maura and Calla, actually. I don’t think anyone else would have thought to stabilise Dick within a trio, rather than a duo.” Helen sat down with studied leisure, crossing her legs. 

“And General Mother was 300% on board because the prodigious offspring can’t be benched for good.” 

Ronan had never harboured a particular affection towards Mrs and Mr Gansey, quite to Niall’s disapproval. His father had always appreciated character, but he hadn’t wanted to see it in action towards the people that got the bulk of the U.S. military on board with Niall’s visionary project. 

Helen shrugged, unfrazzled, a perfectly uncaring child in private, spotless in public. “That’s business as usual, though.”

Down in the training grounds, Gansey had started a warm-up at the bars with Blue. The lowest of the bars hang at two meters height between two pillars — the one that Ronan always disregarded because he could lean against it for leisure — but he got a confused sense of blabbering banter about Blue getting in position for the routine. She was so short, it was borderline ridiculous. But she apparently jumped quite high, and with some very triumphant noises towards Gansey while they dangled face to face, off the floor. Then Gansey said something intelligible and let go of one hand, shifting forward. Blue shifted back, and they started moving, sometimes in jumps and jerks, sometimes in slides. 

This was the type of exercise Ronan had never shared with Gansey. The bars were reserved for drifting pairs, it was too personalised, too convoluted, to _just try it_. It was demanding, hard on the whole body — no falling allowed, no pausing — and Ronan remembered the time he had spent there with Niall so vividly his lungs almost burn with the sensation. In the same occupation, Gansey and Helen had been elegant and well synched like gymnasts. Gansey with Blue was different, almost unbelievably so — it had something of a game, skirting along what was allowed in the rules. 

“How can you stand it?” Ronan whispered, almost under his breath.

“I don’t think I have to _stand it_ ,” Helen replied, with ease, as if she wasn’t watching intently as well. 

“Like hell you don’t, he was your drifting pair and now he’s like…” he gestured at the scene, with Henry still on the ground talking with the both of them on the bars. Watching them was like witnessing a reflection on the surface of a soap bubble — inconsistent and yet undeniably there. 

“He’s my brother. He was my brother, he’s my brother, he’ll always be my brother,” Helen articulated, with firmness, turning around to watch him.

“He was in your mind and you were in _his_ and it’s supposed to mean _something_ —”

“It does.” She cut him off. “It really, really does. But what’s _not_ supposed to mean is that he belongs to me. He’s still my brother.” 

Ronan gritted his teeth hard enough to feel the pressure rising from his gums all the way to his cheekbones. Meanwhile, Blue looped a leg around Gansey’s thigh, for support, and dragged the two of them in a twirl so daring that they came incredibly close to falling — they didn’t, though, their grips alternating on the bar. Gansey’s laughter echoed all the way up the bleacher.

Ronan stood up abruptly. “He’s replacing you.”

“He can’t replace me, I’m still here. He’s just going forward and that’s the only place we’re supposed to go...me, and him, and you...even though we’re not the same.” Helen replied, level-headed as usual. Her voice softened into something more gentle while she spoke.

They were not the same because the two of them were still alive. And Niall wasn’t.

It was so clear, and so close to pity. The only reason Ronan didn’t smash something to recoil against it was that he didn’t want the attention of the trio in training.

He turned around and left from the upper door. No goodbyes and no looking back.

Another burst of laughter from Gansey chased him on his way out. He slammed the door against it.

The rest of the day passed in a blur even more furious than what had recently become Ronan’s usual. 

He didn’t need to countercheck to know that Helen was right on how much of a dead end Noah Czerny was, but he did it anyway, holing up through databases for what felt like the hundredth time. 

He even contemplated going to talk with Declan, but the will for it evaporated the moment he got a glimpse of his brother through the glass office that used to belong to Artemus, elevated above the rest of the labs and offices of the Research, Development and Implementation team. He could see the screens and running codes in execution and Ronan knew, he just knew, that Declan would talk about _drift impact trauma_ , suggest hallucinations, probably even hint to sending Ronan off for a bit — to their mother and to Matthew, as if that could even help. Anger rose at just the _thought_ of it. He turned around and left the Shatterdome all together.

For all intents and purposes, Lantau Island belonged to the Pan Pacific Defence Corps. Every part of it was military territory, even the wild natural patches interrupted only by control towers and satellite antennas. The BMW had always been the only quirk Niall Lynch had conceded himself — useless on an island, even more so considering the much more efficient transportation available to high ranking officials, but Niall had brought it with him for Ireland and kept it in a spotless state for more than ten years. It was the first thing Ronan ever learned how to drive, in place of a bicycle, on the ground that bicycles had been of no interest for Niall Lynch.

The top of the Tai Tung Shan, the Sunset Peak, was a challenge to reach with a car, one that occupied Ronan for the better part of several hours. It would be close to a nightmare to go down in full darkness, but still Ronan leaned against the wheel and watched the sun disappear and didn’t move, as the sky spiralled into a dull black after the explosion of colours of dusk. 

It was getting difficult to remember how it felt, not to be alone in his own mind. The realisation filled him with shame, and a desperate regret.

He couldn’t shake the sensation off him, not even late in the night when he finally stopped the BMW in Hangar #354 — miscellanea equipment and civilian trinkets. 

He walked his way to the Hangar that held Greywaren like a sleepwalker — that, too, felt like the hundredth time. True to what Helen and Gansey had said, his Jaeger was now mostly intact and reshielded, but it had bundles of cables coming off the body. A faint glow shining from the back of the helmet changed the light in the whole hangar. The calibration of core-drift interface must be still in progress — unsurprisingly, considering the nightmare that was dealing with a technology like Dreamcatcher without Niall or Artemus to work their magic on it. 

Ronan climbed on one of metal fixtures and sat there, observing from the shadows between two walking decks. Most of the teams must be on nightly rest and if the works were this close to an end the rota of the Tech officers must have been lifted from top priority schedules. 

In the distance, he could make up Frank Boyd — the Chief Mechanical Tech-Officier — and some other people Ronan never bothered to learn the name of. He still recognised some, nonetheless — probably the best part of Boyd’s high-performance team, constantly aligning with Ronan’s crazy schedule of observation by virtue of being present after hours. In the green hue coming from Greywaren, the only person under forty years old in the team still jumped to Ronan’s eyes — he always did, every time he was there for Ronan to see. This time, Mechanic John Doe — for lack of real name or rank — was crouching beside a ridiculously convoluted equipment. When he combed a hand through his hair, they looked almost blond against the light, though Ronan knew they were darker, almost inconspicuous in their coloring. He had high cheekbones, a weird cut of his face that Ronan could never stop staring at. He frowned often, but composedly. 

Ronan didn’t move for a long time, looking at them working, and trying to stop thinking — to stop feeling. 

It was only when they called it a night — with John Doe taking off the top of his working overall, the t-shirt clinging to his skin and creased with sweat — that Ronan left as well.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Drifting tests were usually carried out in the buildings alloted to the training of piloting recruits, but the program had been steadily de-escalated as the number available Jaegers narrowed in the years that brought them closer to Operation Doomsday so the facilities were rarely used to begin with. Unchallenged by anyone, Declan had taken the liberty of modifying six of the twelve posts to shape a single three-way testing board.

“The records of when Team Fox did this were honestly not that helpful. For you three, I’m trying something a bit more thorough than a leap of faith.” Declan said, moving steadily around them to check each and every wiring of the several electrodes, as if he hadn't witness his own minions going through it a second ago.

“So it’s gonna go live simultaneously?” Gansey asked. He couldn’t see Henry and Blue, though his shoulders almost brushed theirs, one each. They were arranged in a little triangle around a column of plexiglass, filled with not-quite-a-liquid that glowed in its dark viscousness. It was different from any other spot still remaining in the room. 

“You’ll go live exactly like you would on a Jaeger. So yes, all together or not at all. Open up, Gansey.” 

Declan stopped the matter-of-fact explanation to place the last point of contact on Gansey’s tongue. It had a terrible metallic aftertaste and pressed uncomfortably in the middle of the roof of Gansey’s mouth, effectively silencing any further discussion, as it had done with Blue and Henry before him. Gansey only vaguely remembered something similar, from when he was ten years old — he had been facing a fifteen years old Helen, then, and maybe he hadn’t been just as nervous. 

With half a gesture, Delcan sent the three minions he had brought with him — and hadn’t bothered to introduce — to scatter and tune the equipment. He walked away from Gansey with an assessing look. He had a different edge, compared to Ronan, but they were so painfully similar it was sometimes weird to think of how fundamentally incompatible they were. It would probably always be impossible to discern how much of that was their reciprocal nature, and how much of that was Niall’s influence filtering through and cementing like the word of a whimsical God. Of all their features, the deep purple circles under Declan’s eyes were almost a perfect overlap with what Gansey had seen in Ronan just two days prior. If Gansey had to wonder if they had talked at all, for real, since Niall’s death, the answer was probably _not a chance_.

“Reminder for the team, especially for Gansey who hasn’t done a test in almost ten years,” Declan announced, professionally, as if he was addressing an intellectually curious audience rather than three glorified lab rats. It was no wonder that Helen found him profoundly entertaining. “This is not a full drift, it will barely skim the surface. Give you some weighting, maybe, but most of the assessment goes through us with standardised values. We can charge it and decharge it easily, _do not_ try to disengage on your own.”

If he had been able to speak, Gansey would have questioned how they were supposed to disengage on their own if they were strapped hands, feets, foreheads, and God knew how else. He turned his eyes around while several sensors came alight — red, then yellow, then flashing green — but none of the members of the Research, Development and Implementation team met his gaze. No one else was allowed in, but Gansey could bet his most prized possessions that Calla, Maura, Helen and his parents were within reach in the building. Ronan too, with many hallways of distance from the others, if Gansey knew him like he thought he did. 

“All systems green,” one of the scientists said — a lady with blond hair in a ponytail and a weirdly informal marker writing on the collar of her lab coat that read, _Ashley._ “Ready steady in three...two...one…”

Gansey took a long inhale following the countdown but his chest still jumped, hiccupping the air out of his lungs. All the equipment surrounding them stopped flashing and stayed green, very green. Connecting. 

His vision went black and then too bright, the room spinning around him like vertigo. The sounds distorted and than muffled, as if he had dived in under water. In that water, he wasn’t alone, his thoughts stretching out — hopeful and unchecked — and the more they stretched the less alone he was. There wasn’t a net moment of realisation, he didn’t know when the the drumming in his chest started to speed up and his mind became more than its own, more than the sum of what had mingled with him. They had met him halfway — or maybe a third of the way. His yearning was more than his yearning, dreaming for the stars. His fears were more than his fears, spiralling so deep that they bolted back up and scattered in fireworks. His drive was more than his drive, more stubborn and more steady, and yet ready to just let things pass. 

Then it was gone, winding down like a summer storm.

Gansey blinked, and blinked, swallowing dry against the metal in his mouth. He was so self-consistent and restrained, in himself and himself alone, that it made him want to cry. He hadn’t felt so alone since the first time he and Helen piloted together and, when they were finished and disconnected, the drift had lingered and made him sick with withdrawal. There had been no drift now, which maybe made it so much worse. 

Declan pushed the strap away from his forehead and slid the platelet out of his mouth.

“Congratulation, Gansey, this could beat internal records.”

It had been a success. It had been a success. 

The rush of relief Gansey felt over the confirmation almost made his knees buckle while he tried to get himself up. He had avoided thinking of what he would do if this failed, and the concept lodged even more intolerably in his mind, with no logic or common sense whatsoever, now that he knew it hadn’t. He wanted them with him, he wanted to be able to feel them. The only paranoia that didn’t ignite was how Henry and Blue felt — they must feel the same, and total trust filled the gap of what Gansey knew first-hand

When they circled around the pillar to face him, they were both smiling — shook, a bit trembling, even outrageously running a hand through perfectly arranged hair in Henry’s case. Gansey exhaled, the weight on his chest somehow more palpable now that it had lifted. Their raised their hands — Blue the left, Henry the right — and Gansey walked forward with offered palms, high-fiving them both with half a laugh. 

After that, it was all a blur. Meeting, debriefing, meeting. Gansey’s focus was a matter of habit and ingrained reflexes rather than personal commitment or interest. 

On a purely rational level he _was_ interested in the fact that they will be deploying on a cleanup mission in less than 24 hours, baptising the new Jaeger with some Kaiju’s leftovers. He was interested in the dynamics, in the strategy, and even more so in the politics that ran like an undercurrent in this rushed remarking of where the Pan Pacific Defence Corps stood in this changed world. He was, and yet he wasn’t, because his heart kept jumping erratically, clattering in his ribcage at the loss of something he had barely brushed on.

Dinner with Helen and their parents was the last drop in the overflowing vase of Gansey’s restlessness. He got more than one pointed look from his mother, who had a very low appreciation for excessive clattering of cutlery and unrefined displays of _issues_. To her credit, she did attempt a conversation — halfway through the second course, even though it meant involving the vegetables — when it became evident that her son wasn’t in the mood for political finesses handled with political appropriateness. 

For as much as Gansey could appreciate the logistical reassurances on the upcoming mission, and even the rare outright acknowledgment that his performance were difficult to surpass unless Gansey was testing against Ronan, it wasn’t _the point_. 

He wasn’t nervous for the mission. A part of him wasn’t nervous at all, and another part, conversely, was outright _terrified_ of the amount of unknown variables. And, underneath it all, he would be with them. 

He would be with them and they would be with him. 

At the end it was Helen who gave him an out, hinting to a conversation with their parents that was evidently above Gansey’s clearance — direct talks with the U.N., the not-so-subtle possibility that she would be promoted Lieutenant-General in her own right, or that she could be discharged with honours to be moved to represent the Pan Pacific Defence Corps in the political mayhem with the rest of the world. 

Grateful, he kissed her cheeks on the way out and she hugged him briefly, with her good arm. Words would never be a strict necessity for them, not with the private understanding running like an undercurrent built by too many drifts. 

Gansey took the long way around to the core quarters, but even that didn’t abate the jittering in his limbs. So he changed course, passing briefly through his and Helen’s room to recover his bathroom supplies and went to shower. 

It was late, skimming the edge of the night mode in the corridors, and the lights in the shower room only went on at Gansey’s entrance. Turning on the water was an unsettling experience, the fall of every droplet echoing back and forth through the tiles. 

Marking his presence was a learned habit in the pilot quarters — closed opaque glass door and towel tossed above the edge of it. Shower rooms, changing rooms and preparation rooms had only one discerning line: active piloting team or not. Everything else, from sex to age to rank, was rightfully irrelevant. Gansey could distinctly remember some struggle to adjust when he and his family first settled into the base, plus some fairly awkward moments in his teens, but everything faded into familiarity now. 

All the water in the Headquarter was thoroughly recycled and purified in a continuous cycle, but it was also abundant and available in a range of temperatures that went from _might freeze any second to you can brew a tea with it_. With his head bowed under the showerhead, Gansey played with the faucet in its centre, trying to find a sweet balance that would keep him from clattering out of his skin in nervousness. 

Maybe he was putting too much faith in the supernatural features of running water. He washed his hair, soaped up his skin and then rinsed off everything with the same collection of reflexes that dragged him through some of the brain-shambles days after Doomsday. And still, stubbornly, the live wire along his spine kept crackling. 

Gansey huffed, spitting off some water, and dropped his forehead to the wall — cold, solid and _not enough_ — counting the pass of time in droplets hitting his nape. 

Reaching between his legs felt like a desperate attempt more appropriate for a boy much younger than he was, but maybe the rush of an orgasm would make him feel better. It was a hasty affair, with foaming soap easing the way of his strokes — from the base of his cock to his tip, faster once he hardened enough to feel every tug along his stomach. More rush than finesse, something that was guaranteed to work — and yet it didn’t. He skirted pleasure, but then it escaped him. He was so wound up and yet, apparently, not wound up enough to snap clearly. 

“This is just ridiculous,” he uttered to himself, giving up after a second, even more insistent attempt. With his head tilting back up to face the water, he let go of his cock and washed his hands. 

Since both his mind and body were contrary towards _everything_ , tonight, it took more than he would have liked and some doses of colder water for his unsatisfiable erection to calm down. He abandoned the shower in a haste but then idled around in the room, stupefied by the process of drying his hair and putting put clean night clothes on. When he finally made it back to the hallway of the pilots’ rooms, the thought of going back and lying in bed, waiting for the morning and for the new mission to start, made Gansey want to _scream_. 

Ronan, he thought, would very likely deal with him and this mood excellently. 

Maybe Gansey could propose to give another try to what they did for St. Patrick’s day when they had been seventeen and in the middle of a war — surely there must be another old car abandoned around the Shatterdome to load with nitroglycerin instead of gasoline. The thought gave him a pleasant tingle and he sped up through the hallway. Hopefully Ronan would be in his rooms, for once.

But then once he got to Ronan’s door, he didn’t stop. He didn’t stop for Niall’s door, either. He kept going, and going, unbeknownst himself, and halted only at a door two new tags on it, shining with Blue and Henry’s identification numbers.

Gansey knocked, almost in a rush. 

After three hits, he also tapped his dog tags at the readers at the entrance for good measure. 

He didn’t know _why_. He didn’t know what he expected, or what he could be really looking for. He realises it only after, and made a mental note to make up a sensible excuse for this impromptu — maybe something for tomorrow’s mission, as if Blue and Henry hadn’t been with him through all the debriefs. 

Blue opened the door. 

It was a deliberate gesture and she was already looking up exactly at the height where she knew Gansey’s eyes would meet her. Except Gansey found his eyes dropping, wandering.

She stood in front of him in a pair of black underwear and a grey sport bra that lacked of tension, loose as if unclasped at the back. He skin had the same dark tone everywhere, and her fitness was nothing Gansey hadn’t witnessed in other ways before, but he followed the taut line of her stomach all the way to her belly button and then to the side, where the fabric of her underwear was tense over her hip bones. Maybe, if she were to lie down, the bones would protund more and there would be just enough space to slide a hand inside.

Gansey snapped his eyes back up. 

Blue looked back at him, seemingly unaffected but with an asymmetric raise of eyebrows. 

His mind had been in shambles since the morning, but now he was so focused it almost pierced his temples. He looked away, to the doorframe where the door had innocently slid in.

“I apologise,” he rattled. “I didn’t mean to barge in so late. To disturb. I just…”

His eyes wandered again, trying so hard to stay away from Blue that it felt only natural to look _past_ her.

The bed was in view of the door, barely, and Henry was flippantly tilting to the side to look at the proceedings. The covers were tossed off and there were items of clothes scattered on the floor. Henry had a very nice chest, compact and lean as the rest of him, light-skinned in an alluring way in the lighting of the room. The perfect curve of his hair was half-ruined, less gravity-defiant and more encouraging of hand-combing. The grey of his boxers was almost the same as Blue’s bra, bulging in an unmistakable way that was made even more evident by his lounging sideways.

Gansey’s tongue glued to the roof of his mouth. 

Blue’s expression remained remarkably stoney until Henry snorted from inside the room. Only then she broke into a smile, devious like a fox, and took a step backwards. 

“I…” Gansey stuttered, half-certain the door was about to slide close in his face. He rushed to put a hand on the frame to try and stall it, and Blue’s smile only deepened.

“Are you waiting for more people or can you just come in?” Henry called over, putting an end to Gansey’s misery.

“Oh come on, Henry, we could have made him _ask_ ,” Blue protested, but she was already going further into their room, without rectifying what Henry said.

“I would like to come in,” Gansey admitted, still lingering at the entrance.

“Then _come in_ , do I need to drag you like a cat?” Blue’s tone had every suggestion that she would very much enjoy to do so, now that she thought about it.

Clearing his voice against the knot twisting in his throat, Gansey came in. 

Now, and only now, the door closed behind his back, with the slow hissing of air-tight fixtures locking back into place.

“Thank you,” he murmured.

In lieu of a reply, Blue turned away from him and went back to the bed to Henry. The bra was, indeed, unclasped, the two sides of it hanging precariously between her shoulder blades. She shrugged a bit and it slid off, falling on the floor with to join other random items of clothing.

Gansey didn’t know what was so different in seeing her from behind like this, as opposed to seeing her in tight gym clothes. Her black hair was in the same disarray as after a training, but now he could follow the line of her spine, vertebra after vertebra, once again to her underwear. He could see the suggestion of the muscles in her thighs from the tension at the back of her knees, at the tendon of her ankles. She had very nice ankles.

Whatever interest his body might have lacked in the shower ignited here, furiously, so encompassing that it was difficult to remember why, and how, he had been distracted before. There was nothing in his mind, now, that didn’t involve Henry’s hand rising to stroke along Blue’s waist while she climbed on the bed beside him — nothing but the way Henry tilted his head up to kiss her. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t the first time Gansey saw them kissing, nor it was relevant that years in the Corps annihilated prudishness towards naked bodies. 

With them, _just them_ , it was different. Helpless. 

“You can leave your hat on, Thirdish,” Henry called over, a teasing quality in his voice exacerbated by the fact that he spoke while kissing down Blue’s shoulder. 

Gansey took off his t-shirt, then his shoes. His hands stalled, afterwards, on the hem of his trousers — how horrible would it be, to be _presumptuous_? — but when he looked up both Blue and Henry were assessing him head-to-toe. Rather than judging, as they had done when they first landed in the Shatterdome, they seemed to be _savouring_ this. Gansey undid the buttons and dragged the trousers down, to be abandoned on the floor with all the other clothing.

Henry whistled, and beckoned Gansey forward with one hand.

Gansey half-stumbled in his last steps towards the bed, almost falling towards them — just like they had fallen together, this morning, in the outskirt of their minds. Henry grabbed his hand, Blue looped around his other arm, and then it wasn’t quite falling. More like letting go.

From previous interactions, he had half-expected Henry to be the one to welcome him more, but instead he shuffled around Gansey, pushing him towards Blue. She was naked, very much basically naked, and evidently bolder than Gansey himself was feeling, because she dragged him forward, into her arms. He gave in easily, echoing the path Henry’s hand had traced on her hips, and she tilted her head to the side to make space for him in the crook of her neck. 

Gansey kissed Blue’s neck with reverence, slow enough that his own breath didn’t shake too much and he could feel the fluttering of her pulse under his lips. She was so warm, and so familiar for someone so technically stranger in his life — he closed his eyes against it. It only got warmer when Henry slid close to his back, tracing with his nose at the base of Gansey’s spine. 

Only then, plastered between the two of them, Gansey dared to exhale, the whirlpool of his haunted thoughts finally — _finally_ — winding down. 

“You smell like shampoo,” Henry whispered on his skin. A gentle touch traced from Gansey’s elbows up to his shoulders, getting bolder in the progress.

“I was just in the shower.” Gansey kissed his way down to Blue’s collarbones — he had always found them nice, in display above the fabric of her tank tops, but they were even nicer like this.

“That’s very considerate of you,” Blue highlighted, with the vaguest mockery of Gansey’s accent. It was difficult to feel irked when she made Gansey’s abdominal muscles spasm, tracing along them with the tip of her fingers. In turn, Gansey dropped his mouth open and licked on her skin.

It was so easy, to let go.

Blue gave a little hum of appreciation and bent her fingers — just enough that her nails ran a path upwards on his chest. Gansey arched away from it, just a bit, but Henry pressed him forward, with both hands on Gansey’s back and his mouth on the knob of Gansey’s spine, and there was nowhere to go. 

Gansey exhaled again, almost content in the narrowing choices. 

Between the Blue’s fingers tracing up and down his torso and the other hand that combed through his hair to press him more firmly on her skin, it took Gansey a while to realise that Henry’s touches on his back weren’t quite random. The scars of the piloting suit were a permanent fixture on Gansey’s body after a decade of constant drifting — they were also disconcertingly sensitive, it seemed. 

“Mh…” Gansey hummed, goosebumps rising all the way along his arms. 

Distracted and spiralling, Gansey dropped his mouth open on Blue’s navel and tasted her skin again. 

He was holding her so close already, but she only sighed when Gansey’s arm circled even more firmly around her waist, two fingers skimming at the edge of her underwear. Boldened by her agreeability, he kissed the underside of her breast — just as compact as the rest of her, but Gansey could still feel the weight of it on his cheeks. She murmured something indistinct and pulled him forward by the grip in his hair, until he traced her nipple with his tongue. The shiver that followed was very satisfactory. 

He felt the outline of Henry’s teeth on his own shoulder blades, and reached blindly — vaguely uselessly — behind. He got some skin, though, his fingers digging in the firm muscles of Henry’s thighs, and he got nibbled on a bit more for his troubles. 

Drowned in sensations, Gansey’s mind was blissfully quiet.

Blue let herself fall a bit against the pillows that rested against the headboard — not quite sitting, not quite laying down — and Gansey followed, helplessly, half-kneeling on the narrow bed. It didn’t feel that awkward, after all, not with Blue’s nipple growing hard and sensitive. He gasped when she pushed him back, only to guide him to move on the other side. It was easy, to follow the demands.

He had lost his feeble grip on Henry, but Gansey could feel him kissing lower, along the deep scars that outlined the centre of his back. The skin was softer around them, and Gansey gasped when Henry sucked on it — squirming when he kept at it long enough to leave a mark. Henry retreated at that, and let Gansey catch his breath while stroking along Blue’s skin, in a cross of too many arms. 

Inhale. Exhale. 

Gansey skimmed with his fingers at Blue’s hip bones, just as tantalising to the touch as they were to the eyes. He would have asked — _something_ , probably. But then Henry’s mouth was back at the bent of Gansey’s spine, and his thumb dug exactly where he had been kissing before. Gansey lost the train of thought. 

He caught his breath against Blue’s neck, and she snickered a bit, kissing on his hair. When she stroked along his stomach — lower, and _lower_ — Gansey had a moment of queasy excitement, uncertain of how to survive if she were to touch him where he was harder than ever before in his life. But she didn’t — deviating last minute, she grasped on the side of his boxers and dragged them down over the curve of Gansey’s arse. For a second, the tension of the fabric rubbing on his erection was _maddening_.

“Thanks, Blue.” Henry’s voice shook almost cold where the skin of Gansey’s back was wet with his spit.

“Anytime,” Blue almost singsonged, with a small kiss on Gansey’s temple.

Henry bit him, again, halfway to Gansey’s waist, and then took his mouth off. If it was intended to be a warning, Gansey’s definitely caught it too late. He had the vague impression of the mattress sinking under Henry’s shuffling weight. Then there was a hand on Gansey’s left naked cheek, spreading him open, and Henry licked along the crack of his ass — long, and wet.

“Oh my God.” Gansey’s jumped, just a bit, but Blue’s hand in his hair pulled him into stillness.

“I know, right?” She asked, rhetorical, the grin filtering in her voice.

The mental flash of Henry kneeling behind Blue, doing the same to her, was _intolerable_. Gansey tensed against the thought burning hot in his mind, and Henry just licked him more purposefully — the tip of his tongue catching at Gansey’s rim.

“Oh my _God_ ,” he reinstated, voice cracking.

Blue pulled at his hair, again, and Gansey went easily, lifting his head. There was a little glittering of satisfaction in her eyes, perhaps even more so because Gansey felt frayed at the edges. She dragged his boxers further down, purposefully ignoring the way his dick jumped a bit at the released tension of the fabric, and left them rolled in the middle of Gansey’s thighs. He couldn’t get them all the way off, not if he didn’t want to dislodge Henry — who was licking him slow, just so slow, circling at the rim. It was hard not to clench against it, even with Henry’s left hand going to grasp at Gansey’s hips, steading him. 

“Ah…” Gansey’s eyes fluttered, fogging his focus on Blue just a bit. 

He moved on a reflex, grabbing at the bent of Blue’s right thigh with one hand to fit her better against him while reaching blindly with the other. When he stroke over Henry’s fingers, Henry met him easily, letting of Gansey’s waist to twine their fingers together. The gesture must have pleased him because Gansey heard a low hum from behind him. Slick from the spit, Henry’s index wiggled at Gansey’s hole for a second, before sliding inside all the way to the second knuckle. 

“Wow, you really like this,” Blue whispered, breathing heavy. 

Another index, another fingertip and she rubbed at the slit of his cock, where he was slippery from undeniable excitement. 

“Have you done this before?” Blue pressed on, when Gansey didn’t comment immediately.

For once in his life, it was challenging to hold a conversation — he couldn’t do _proper_ , he couldn’t do _argumentative_. His voice didn’t even sound fully his own when Gansey countered, “This what?”

There was a shameless smacking sound when Henry stopped licking him for a second just to pipe in. “With three. With a man.”

“Neither,” Gansey gasped, just a bit. 

Maybe it wasn’t such a terrible answer, because Henry wiggled another finger inside him, with a subtle undertone of reward. The stretch was intense, extremely intimate — exactly at the edge that Gansey _needed_ — even more so when Henry licked around his own fingers again.

He dropped his forehead on Blue’s chest, to catch his breath. Witnessing her slender hand stroking at his cock was an accidental occurrence that worsened the situation. It didn’t matter that Gansey had fooled around with some girls, some boys, at the base during the years, after all. 

“No one like this,” he confessed, with a shiver. 

“Awww,” Blue cooed at him. It was difficult to feel really mocked when she prompted Gansey to lift his head and then nosed her way to his neck, starting to kiss him from behind his ear. 

Gansey wanted more, he wanted less, he wanted to not get teased so much anymore and at the same time he never, ever, wanted them to stop playing with him like he belonged them.

When Blue wiggled out of her underwear it was almost a relief, even though she almost knocked Gansey in the chest with one knee. At least Gansey could reach over and _touch her_ , properly, finally, and have some distraction from the maddening circling of her fingertips pulling his foreskin back. He ran his hand all the way up Blue’s leg, stroking the back of his fingers along the crease of her thighs before spreading his thumb and touching her right where she was the warmest. 

“Oh!” Blue hitched, from where she was going back at sucking the skin of Gansey’s neck.

There was a low chuckle from behind his back, a small bite on Gansey’s ass — spread over Henry’s hands if not on his tongue. “What have you done, Richie Rick?”

“I’m touching her,” Gansey whispered, unnecessarily subdued. And yet it did feel like a big deal, being able to caress her deeper, more fully — some pressure, and then some more, sliding gently where she was wet and sensitive. 

“Is he good?” Henry enquired, which was absolutely unfair coming from someone who had two fingers lodged deep in Gansey’s ass, rocking back and forth with leisure. 

Blue’s lips were pressed together, but when Gansey circled on her clit over and then again she shivered. “Yes…”

Excitement burned white-hot through Gansey’s mind, pushing him forward towards Blue’s hand — then backwards towards Henry’s. It wasn’t enough, it wasn’t. 

“Ah...shit…” Blue gasped once more, when Gansey rubbed his fingers up and down as if to ease the pressure and then stroked in circles again.

At every broken inhale he could feel her shiver more, tensing. He raised his head just to look at her, when Blue looked up at the ceiling and clasped her knees at Gansey’s waist, coming in a wave. She looked nice in her pleasure, more giving and yet a bit commanding, as if she was still taking more than she would ever give back. There was nothing Gansey wanted more than to give, and give, and _give_ to her. 

Focused as he was, Gansey noticed that Henry had finally emerged from behind his back only when he leaned a cheek on his shoulder. “Very nice,” Henry praised, and somehow that heightened the satisfaction of the whole ordeal. Gansey could feel himself clenching a bit on Henry’s fingers when he bent them. 

“ _Stop_ , stop…” Blue protested, too overwhelmed to be really contrary, especially considered that she rocked against Gansey’s hand when he started rubbing again, sliding lower — wet and slippery and just so agreeable to the touch. 

He did stop, though, and she squirmed around enough to drag a little tin box away out of the fixture of the bed frame and onto the mattress. Whatever Gansey had been expecting, seeing Blue recover a condom and opening it with her teeth wasn’t among the close possibilities.

“You’re gonna fuck me,” Blue ordered — or proposed, the distinction wasn’t quite as clear when she was this close to sliding the condom on his cock.

“Oh, yes please,” Gansey begged, unabashed, feeling himself jump eagerly in her hand — so unbelievably hard it almost _hurt_ — when she jerked him over the condom.

She laughed at his shamelessness, and that melted some of her pent-up tension without dissolving her eagerness.

“That’s very courteous of you, Gansey boy,” Henry praised him.

A hand turned Gansey’s face to the side and Henry’s voice dissolved into a whisper on Gansey’s lips, before they kissed. 

Among all the possible gestures, this was the one that made his world tilt the most. It felt like ages since Gansey had been kissed, and he knew exactly where Henry’s mouth had been. The heady shiver of pleasure was only exacerbated by Henry plastering fully on his back, right while Blue hooked a leg around them both and pressed on Gansey’s front. Gansey whimpered on Henry’s tongue — and Blue’s breath hitched right in his ear when the position brought the new intimacy of his cock sliding against her pussy. She rocked against him, slotting him even more perfectly in the warmth of her labia, and Gansey flickered his tongue against the roof of Henry’s mouth, torn between begging her to stop and begging her to get herself off just like this. 

Henry came up for breath with a half bite on Gansey’s lips. “Stop torturing him, I’m kind of suffering too, you know?”

“I’m heartbroken,” Blue snickered again, but then she tossed an arm around Gansey’s shoulders, grabbing onto Henry’s neck over him, and she tilted against him — _just so_ , her hard nipples squished on Gansey’s chest. 

They were so close, and Gansey felt them both so much. It seemed impossible to feel even more, but then Blue’s hips canted. From one moment to another, he was _inside her_ , sliding in almost effortlessly.

His head swung and only the presence of Henry beside — kissing his temple, keeping him there — made him refrain from jerking around. Gansey grasped on Blue’s hips and rocked them a bit closer, until he could feel her thighs on his thighs and there was nowhere else to go. 

It felt so intimate, like someone finally found all of Gansey’s lose, incomplete edges and clicked him in his rightful spot of a bigger puzzle.

“Jane…” 

“Oh, fuck you,” Blue protested, reflexively, even though she tightened around him — as if knowing full well, like Gansey did, that this was his name for her, and _his only_.

“You seem to be doing a good job at it yourself, B.,” Henry mused, but the delivery was trampled by the panting of his breath, evidently turned on by the whole ordeal. Gansey could feel him, hard against his leg, but mostly he felt him knuckle-deep in his ass. “How does it feel?”

“He’s big...big-thick, I mean...you’ll like it…” Blue ground slowly against Gansey, assessing the movement, and slid her head to the side of Gansey’s to rest her forehead against Henry’s. 

Henry’s chin dug almost at the bend of Gansey’s neck, but Gansey couldn’t focus on whether it was uncomfortable or not. With his hands getting a full grasp of Blue’s hips and ass, he exhaled. “Will he?”

“So much, _Dick_ , you have no idea,” Henry murmured against the shell of Gansey’s ear, a low rumble that went straight to his cock, as if Gansey wasn’t already hard enough to best years of erections. 

Neither of them specified in which moment Henry would get to enjoy Gansey’s apparent thickness. As it was, Henry was surging past Gansey to kiss Blue, and his fingers turned and wiggled — deep, and slick, and maddening — in Gansey’s ass. 

Watching them kissing was hypnotic — so up close that Gansey could almost fantasise about joining him, if only his brain were coherent enough to suggest a real dynamic. He let his knees sag more against the mattress, already thinned and squeaking a bit under their combined movements. 

More giving up of his weight against Henry’s chest, more dragging Blue up to sit on his own thighs properly, just _more_. 

Gansey didn’t have much leverage to deliver but his efforts were appreciated. He heard Blue sighing, the sound of her deep kissing of Henry stumbling, and Henry, in turn, pushed forward enough that he rocked the three of them together, effectively enforcing a rhythm — thrust his fingers into Gansey, make him jump towards Blue, make Blue grind down more purposefully to get a proper fucking. 

It was difficult to think that his mind had ever been busy with something else — anything else — if he could have _them_.

When Henry’s fingers settled back in again and he _curled them_ , Gansey’s body quivered before he himself got the sensation in full. Electric, intense, _unfeasible_ , even more so with Blue’s tightening heat surrounding them.

“Do it again, he liked it,” Blue directed, next to Gansey’s face.

“Like this?” Henry whispered, kissing her face. 

He rubbed, hard, _perfect_. Gansey shook, writhing between them with no real leeway, pressed between their bodies. 

“I’m right here, you know?” 

It took him three attempts in taking a full breath, to stutter it out. In return, they both laughed and kissed his neck — one side each.

“Don’t we know it,” Blue drawled, a little moan in her voice when she raised in his arms and then slammed down again on his dick. “Are you having fun?”

Gansey nodded, mindlessly, his lungs on fire. He very much was, and yet he wanted to cry in protest. He dropped his head backwards on Henry’s shoulder, feeling himself tightening around his fingers, even more so when Henry circled gently inside him. It was completely foreign — rightfully so, no one ever had Gansey like this — but everything was natural with the two of them.

“Can you just fuck me?” Gansey blurted out, without any real pre-processing.

That made them both still, but they shivered all three together, and the excitement was unmistakable. 

“Just like this?” Henry hushed, like a secret in Gansey’s ear, before kissing the shell of it and thrusting his fingers in and out — long, purposeful, as if Gansey didn’t get it in the previous half an hour.

Gansey swore under his breath in a way that would have made Ronan proud — possibly more than the sex Gansey had just involved himself in. “Yes, or you stop fingering me, because I swear…”

Henry took his fingers out, suddenly almost rushed. He was going to do it, Gansey knew he was going to. 

Blue was looking at them intently — flushed all the way down her chest, with her dark hair plastered awkwardly at the side of her head. She let go of the loop around their bodies, to give Henry some room. That left Gansey with her full weight to sustain, and her heat to thrust into with more abandon, even though there seem to be no possible exorcising for the spiral of excitement that had taken over Gansey’s head from so many sides. 

It was Henry that stalled him — even while Blue whined in protest. One hand on Gansey’s hips and teeth biting into his neck were all the warning Gansey got before the tip of Henry’s cock nudged at his rim and then pushed his way inside — insistent, relentless. Gansey made a small sound deep within his throat. 

“M-mh,” Blue shook her head, nosing along Gansey’s face to kiss the space between his eyes. “Deep breath. Come on.” 

It was difficult to disobey when she was so forward, so engrossed in the whole act. 

Flashes bombarded Gansey’s mind — how many times have they done this? With whom? Was it this crazy just for him, and normal for them? — but she clicked her tongue softly and Gansey could only try. He gaped and then wheezed in. His ribs expanded, skin on skin on skin, and somehow it did help, unreasonably. 

When Henry pulled him backwards by the hips, Gansey’s body was ready to concede, spreading where he was already soft. The teeth on his nape moved to the shoulder, digging down again, and there was something reassuring about knowing that Henry was feeling it as much as him, while his cock pushed past any ring of resistance. The fingers had felt big, but an incoherent part of Gansey’s brain thought this was going to go on forever, even after Henry was pressed in a smooth curve on Gansey’s back and there was no more cock to take.

“Please,” Henry whispered against Gansey’s skin. “Please tell me you like this, I’ll make it so good for you, please.”

“Yes,” Gansey choked, vision swimming with the intensity of his need, of Henry’s need, of Blue’s need where she was back at grasping the two of them at the same time. “Yes, yes…”

Any further agreeable encouragement, or anything really, died off with a strangled sound at Henry’s first thrust. Gansey abandoned the middle of Blue’s back to grasp on the metal headboard of the bed with his left hand, hugging Blue closer with the right, fingertips digging in the softness of her ass. Henry did it again, then once more. 

“Ah... _Ah_ …”

Gansey’s eyes crossed. He didn’t know if he wanted Henry to slow down, or go deeper, or let Gansey _adjust_. Clinging to them both, Blue was grinding against him with abandon, countering Henry’s thrusts perfectly. Gansey didn’t know what he wanted in this, either, but it didn’t matter — he wanted _this_ , and _they_ would handle it. He held on, legs more spread and weight more even, and gave in, taking it and taking it. 

The bed whined, ignored and overcome by the sounds they were making. 

Gansey burned all over. He wanted to scream, but Blue was pulling his head back — a solid grip in his hair — for Henry to kiss him, so he didn’t. He sucked on Henry’s tongue, and licked along the roof of his mouth, until he heard Henry moan in a fractured way that made Gansey tremble all over in turn. 

Blue’s hips jutted erratically. Gansey had no leverage but he still tried to grab her more firmly. She was squeezing him so hard, growing more heated with her pleasure by the minute, relentless. It drove Gansey crazy.

“You’re gonna make me come…” he complained, or begged, or suggested, separating from Henry with wet lips.

“Yeah?” Blue rambled, half out-of-tune, mostly out of it. 

She slammed on Gansey harder, almost viciously. Her nipples were hard against Gansey’s chest but he couldn’t touch her any more than this, trying to shoulder Henry’s rhythm and holding her up at the same time. It didn’t matter, not if the fluttering of her eyelids were anything to go by. 

Gansey had seen her come, had made her come, but what approached seemed to belong to another level — more visceral, belonging to the three of them — together, or not at all. 

He wanted to tell her how this felt — he wanted to tell them both — but arching back against Henry just a bit made the next thrust land with impossible perfection, and Gansey just _couldn’t._

Instead, he surged forward and kissed Blue, no question asked and very little finesse. 

She kissed back with eagerness and stupor, no reticence in sight, and heat pooled down in Gansey’s stomach as she writhed around him. 

Henry’s running his nails on the sensitive skin of Gansey’s hip was the last coherent perception Gansey had, before everything fragmented in a list of indistinguishable pleasures.

The bed frame slammed against the wall, insistent. He came hard, like a spring snapping, his orgasm exacerbated by the simultaneous stimulation — Henry in his ass, Blue at his front, so much skin so much contact, just _so much_. It was visceral, like drifting, ricocheting through all of them just to return on Gansey at ten fold strength. 

He wheezed, but it didn’t really feel like breathing. 

His lungs returned to him only later, collapsed on the bed but still snuggled tight between Blue and Henry — safe and satisfied, but most importantly _belonging_. 

After grinding through the day, and burning through this night, Gansey’s eyelids tingled with heaviness. It almost hurt to try and keep them open, so he didn’t, letting Blue and Henry guide his head in turns to kiss him while they all regained some sort of calmness. The warmth of them was encompassing.

“Can I stay the night?” He asked, with great effort, when Blue was just nibbling at his swollen lips.

“You’re not going anywhere.”

It was a perfect choir, coming from around him. Gansey’s sternum tingled, from the inside, like a thousand bees buzzing to keep the hive alive. 

He smiled and let the darkness spread, an overwhelming relief lulling him to sleep.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The digital clock that dominated the operation hall read 06.21, but the Shatterdome was in full activity. Under the green digits there was another screen, golden and flashing.

_Launch in 00.39.18._

The penultimate time it had been lit, it had been for Operation Doomsday and there had been three Jaegers in ready-steady. The last time, Greywaren had been deployed and they had recovered it in pieces — piloting team and weapon alike.

Among the ranks of the Techs, Adam could almost taste the nervousness. 

Mechanics were notoriously prone to superstitions — little gestures that were to be performed in a certain order, with certain tools, magic values to punch in the calibration of equipment. In Adam’s experience that changed very little between run-down car maintenance and single-handedly sustaining a futuristic weapon of mass destruction. No protocol would save them from the fact that they would just have to trust and pray that the combo of new team plus new Frankenstein-Jaeger would deliver. That didn’t stop them for trying, and under Boyd’s instructions Adam had to do a fourth connectivity check on weapons that would never be engaged on a clean-up mission like this one — _but just in case, Parrish._

He glanced beyond the equipment. 

The HQ commanding bridge was elevated from the operation hall, partially isolated from potential noise, but the figures of the high-rank officials were readily identifiable. It was weird, after years with a different routine, to see the Lieutenant Generals Sargent and Johnson sitting down beside Dr Major Declan Lynch and General Astrid Gansey, ready to participate actively from the other side of the playing field rather than from inside a Jaeger. The last time they had done this, they lost transmission and chaos had ensued. Even weirder still, was Colonel Helen Gansey, standing between her mother’s and Declan’s chair, in full official uniform. 

By contrast, Colonel Ronan Lynch was in a full pilot attire, the suit clinging to his skin as if he was born in it — black and silver and deep blue, the colours even more fluid as he sat plastered on an empty section of the console, his back pressed on the glass walls that enclosed the bridge. His profile was stark, cutting like tempered fiberglass, and he frowned at nothing. 

It was the perfect forbidding military picture, and yet Adam could only think, _we’re not the only ones who are nervous_.

Everyone knew Ronan Lynch would not engage with a room full of high-ranks unless the world was literally ending. There were proofs.

They all could see the report screens that interfaced with the Jaeger, the transmission covering an entire wall of the central dome. 

_“Pilots onboarding.”_

The report echoing from the loudspeakers sent a shiver down Adam’s spine. 

Somewhat late, yesterday, he had crossed Blue in the hallway, going back to her rooms with Henry Cheng. She had been so open, hugging him one armed and introducing him with an enthusiastic gesture to her copilot.

“This is _Adam_ ,” she had said, with a peculiar stress on his name.

“Who is still not coming to the training grounds,” Henry had completed, with ease and good humour. “Still, a pleasure.” 

It had felt weird to know that she would talk about him with someone she _drifted_ with. A part of Adam’s mind would always be stuck on the intimacy that came with the neural connection — unreachable for him, who had broken anyone who even tried to skim the surface, unlike Blue and Cheng who were out breaking pre-synch records with Gansey. 

Adam was well-acquainted with bitterness and he felt it tingling in his nostrils when the three of them entered the field of view of the inner cameras. 

With such a big projection, it was easy to have different focuses — overall hutch, each of the pilots, even though with three with it was almost crammed. Their suits were mismatched in colours and style, and it was clear that Blue and Henry’s had just been adapted from a general model to fit the new neural connectors, whereas Gansey’s was highly personalised as every top-tier pilot. It didn’t matter much, however, not when their eyes glittered in the same way, and they kept staring at each other while sliding in the piloting gears.

Definitely bitterness. 

_“Connecting neural branches.”_

Not even Boyd could push the team to keep working on inane tasks of dubious use while they were getting this close to the main event. 

Adam turned around and tried to lean again the work table, but it was difficult to relax even that little. 

Within a few seconds, all three pilots jerked reflexively at the piercing of the connectors interfacing them with the Jaeger. Even in this, Gansey was a showcase of experience, barely blinking funny and assessing his stance. Rumours had it connectors hurt, a lot. Adam would have had to try, to figure out how much. He had always been good with pain, whether he wanted to be or not, maybe he would be good at this was well.

Except he would never be allowed to. 

On the reporting screen, the vitals were stable, all the readings of pre-connection matched up. Adam didn’t even have to look at reference values to know. Around him, the whole hall inhaled in perfect stillness, perfectly aware of what was coming. 

_“Initiating neural handshake.”_

Even Declan Lynch’s voice had an undertone that Adam decided to pin as nerves, even though the Head of the Research, Development & Implementation was nothing if not unflappable. 

The three brainwave graphs flashed white, initiating a new sequence, and all the three curves had a sudden spike up followed by an abrupt drop down — neural cliffs, sending them to tumble down. Adam saw them spasming, so far away in the hue of the active hutch that they seemed surreal. 

It was starting, it was starting.

The thought of them diving in each other’s minds, with a welcoming disposition as they said in the training, gave Adam a nauseating recoil — like an intrusive thought, so disturbing but so desiderable at the same time.

In years of successful neural connections being performed at the base, Adam never witnessed something quite like this. 

It had nothing of the harmony of the Fox trio, whose brainwaves had always matched in an hypnotic flow, interchangeable and almost _mobile_ to look at on the graph. It was definitely not a Lynch-style approach, in which one could predict the final profile for the day from how Lieutenant General Niall Lynch will kick off — Ronan Lynch’s brainwaves, somehow, always managed to follow. And even though Gansey was in the trio, he didn’t seem to be able to reproduce the upbeat sparks that had characterised the brother and sister drifting, outgaming each other in a ramp before finding an easy point agreeable for both of them.

This was messy, to say the least. Chaotic.

Cheng’s waves were too tight, a packed propagation that could only be described as anxious. Blue’s were almost too low, which was weird for someone who had such a quirky personality, but their amplitudes hung so close to the passing mark under which a drift won’t even initiate that it felt like a miracle they were even on. 

Still, Gansey was probably the main problem in the mix.

They all saw it, when he started to diverge. 

He had started stable, a usual Colonel Richard Gansey III show of textbook brainwaves with impeccable performance, but while the timestamp progressed in quarters of the second the amplitude and wavelength ramped up, and collapsed down. 

It was impossible to know what they were seeing in each other, now, but something must be active. Drifting was always a universe aside. The little jerks of their bodies were evident, at time they appeared more in synch in whatever pool of memories they were fishing at, sharing. Nevertheless, Gansey was holding up increasingly badly, vitals chasing after his own brain in increasing distress.

A low hum propagated through the military composure of the operation hall. 

It wasn’t gossiping, more like horror. 

Each of them remembered Doomsday first hand, from the other side of those same screens. The connection had been poor, increasingly glitchy while the Jaegers withstood damages. But at every check that flashed Gansey had looked worse — and worse, and worse — his mind collapsing on itself. This looked very similar, but the drifting quality was perfect — unscarred, unpolluted. 

The pilot in itself was a problem.

Adam shouldn’t sympathise, and yet _he did_ , faced with the desperate struggle of a legend of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps without anything to contribute to it, one way or another.

Biting the inside of his cheek, he glanced up at the bridge. 

Helen was bent forward, consulting furiously with four people that actually had control of the proceedings. All the heads sitting in a line were concentrated in the furious task of managing this madness on the run. Ronan was no longer sitting against the wall, but was furiously speaking with his brother and Gansey’s mother. Among all of them, only Calla and Maura were tense but focused, as if waiting for something.

Through the raising commotion engulfing the hall — understandably uncertain of what they could be waiting for before the mission even begun — the sudden clatter coming from the transmission of the Jaeger attracted everyone’s attention. 

With a pull that definitely tested the moving range of the piloting handlers, Blue was twisting forward, the inside of her wrists pressing on her temples. Adam wasn’t sure if she was hurting — physically, or mentally, or both — and it filled him with powerless anguish.

“You two are a _hellish_ piece of work and I’m not sure I signed up for this, I swear!”

The barking that came from the Jaeger — half-echoing in the transmission — was almost anticlimactic. It didn’t make rational sense that Blue could be so casually crossed with her copilots, in a way that almost felt like bickering, and yet she was. From the focused camera, Adam saw her shaking like a leaf, but gritting her teeth like a very pissed off meerkat. 

While Henry and Gansey’s eyes were still unfocused, lost in some agitated point in the drift, Blue was staring forward, more lucid by the minute. 

“Come on,” she hissed, for the whole base to hear. 

It was weird, to see graphs displaying something that should have definitely be in the training books of the pilot recruits, if it were to be generally possible. 

Blue’s brainwaves sparked up, and then down, and then doubled frequency, almost spiteful.

To have this much variability and have her still lucid seemed surreal. She shook through it, as if she was feeling it distantly rather than dragging it into reality. 

Up and down and up and strong and low and crowded. 

The profiles were morphing into something more repetitive, but still not quite matching in themselves. And yet, in the confusion, the overall triple-drifting curve was steadily stabilising. 

Cheng was the one who seemed to regain some lucidity faster, even though the close-up of his figure in the hutch betrayed the sweat dripping from his forehead, on no bigger effort than whatever was going on in their minds.

“Come on, Gansey,” he gritted through clenched teeth. 

Up in the commanding bridge, there seemed to be an argument about disconnection with winning side so far. Only Maura and Calla were not participating to the discussion, entrenched in watching the parameters jerking around. Adam had always been good in this type of analysis, but performing it on the run — with the added anxiety that one of them will snap soon and bring up the headcount yet again — was challenging.

With Cheng to support her, however, Blue didn’t stretch quite so thin, straightening back in the harness — her eyelids batting too rapidly. Gansey’s figure, on the other hand, had all the signals of imminent shock, or a panic attack, or both.

“You have to let go,” Henry insisted, though no opposition had been voiced. There was a weird silence in the hall, left echoing after his words. “Don’t be afraid.”

Looking at the three separate curves kept being a disaster, but Adam tried to focus on the summation. It was almost a functional drifting profile in its own right, if not for when Gansey’s curve collapsed into madness. If Boyd had given him a puzzle like this, Adam would have told him to connect whatever signal-passing equipment he was using more steadily, because it must be working _wonders._

Was it even possible, to have a signal-passing person, in the drift? 

_I’m drift compliant_ — Blue had told Adam, back in the hangar — _a damn stabiliser._

“I don’t know how to.” 

Hearing Gansey’s speak was shocking, to the point that even the commotion in the commanding bridge halted. 

“You don’t have to know, you just have to try. With us.” It was a weird somberness, for someone like Henry that Adam had never seen without a smirk, of a joke, or a running blabbery.

“Yes, it should be so,” Blue confirmed.

“You see, she says it should be so.” Henry tilted his head even though they were not exactly looking at each other.

It was a weird moment, one in which Adam the whole conversation — the whole _communication_ — was likely passing through more than words. He had seen it before, witnessing teams in mission, but never quite _like this_ — raw, and personal.

Gansey opened his mouth, wheezing a couple of time before breathing in. And then he snickered, unrefined and unconstrained.

He slumped in the harness, looking very little the Colonel whose prowess was broadcasted throughout the world and much more like someone young and wild. Reliable, attainable.

Adam had always wanted to know Richard Campbell Gansey III, gilded with the envy of a celebrity that moved smoothly through every path in which Adam had stumbled. He didn’t know _who_ this was, but it was just as difficult to disregard. It was almost unfair.

It was almost anticlimactic, how little it took for the catastrophe to devolve into an easy approximation of a fix-up. 

One second, Gansey was struggling to breathe and his brain curve kept diverging, rippling out of any periodicity. The next, Gansey was laughing, and the oscillations were wild, but something critical must have smoothened out. 

In a screen full of warning signs, a green writing flashed. 

_Drifting established._

“There must be a glitch. Parrish go and recover the team we should check on the spot,” Boyd deliberated, always too resolute in decisions.

“It’s not a glitch,” Adam countered, a weird certainty grating at his ribcage from the inside.

“Don’t take the piss, lad, those curves are a joke.” 

They were a joke, there was no question. Marked with H, B, and G and followed by the pilots personal number, there was nothing coherent and congruent about the curves in display. And yet, further down, another graph ran serenely, the increasing timestamp deleting the previous madness in favour of the current profile. 

_A damn stabiliser._

“The overall curve is matching. They are matching just...the long way around.” Adam pointed it over, under the scrutiny of too many eyes and the beginning of protests building up around him before the Tech team actually followed his gesture. 

Adam glanced up at the commanding bridge, and apparently the realisation had already dawned there. Declan Lynch was furiously discussing something with a very smug Lieutenant General Johnson, and the two Ganseys present — mother and daughter — kept interjecting with evident worry.

However, amidst all the commotion, Adam found himself focusing on Ronan Lynch. 

Lynch was bothered by nothing but the transmission screen and by the little bursts of Gansey’s laughter still echoing through the hall. Abruptly, the Colonel turned on his heels and left the command room, violent as a storm — and just like that, Adam knew they must be safe.

“Mark III-2.2, do you copy?” 

Maura’s voice, echoing through the loudspeaker and transmitted to the Jaeger, had something uncharacteristically shakey. 

Gansey’s intermittent laughter died out, like water filtering off a crack. Maniac, or just a bit unhinged.

“Do you copy?”

“Copy.”

At the second prompt, almost as an afterthought, three voices came as one.

An excited murmur passed through the gathered teams — incredulous but oh-so-hopeful. The Pan Pacific Defence Corps were ill-acquainted with hope, and yet traded in it insistently. Since the day Adam had arrived — fifteen, and hopeless, but _willing_ — that, among everything, made him feel drawn to stay. Even now, he felt less alone, sharing similar feelings. And at the same time, he was still isolated. 

Adam had trained for this, and he had lost it, without even tasting it. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be one of the trio, or be with them, in a rightful spot. He was even less sure he wanted to analyse this feeling at all, with no outcome in sight. 

He bit the inside of his lips and watched. 

Further off, in the launching hangar, Mark III-2.2 was charging up in drifting energy, a low glow in its helmet, like shining eyes. 

“Do you have a name to baptise the deploy?”

Adam batted his eyes at the question, turning around to see General Astrid Gansey leaning towards her microphone on the bridge station. There was a stiffness in her stance, and in her voice — barely there, but Adam still instinctively recognised it as _not so impressed by the current performance_. A section of his brain panicked and froze, even though he wasn’t the target, even though it had been so long since he paid the consequences of things like this.

On the wide-angle screen, Gansey was turning around from his central position — head pilot in the trio, unchallenged — to look at Henry and Blue, who backed him in a perfect triangle. The harness infrastructure connected them in glowing paths, like intersecting curves rather than straightforward lines. 

“You’re unbelievable,” Blue said, replying to something that bystanders didn’t get to share. Yet, she was smiling, shaking her head indulgently. 

Henry shrugged, sweat drying on his forehead very slowly. His head made a weaving motion to convey his agreeability to whatever might be about to come.

Elated, Gansey turned back around towards their own screen, and the operating hall incidentally. There was a splitting grin on his face, almost buzzing with the same energy that permeated the Jaeger.

He pushed a hand forward in the piloting harness, echoed perfectly by Blue. Then back with one foot, with Henry matching. 

It was like the final rehearsal of a dance, settling into an unprecedented shape. 

The Jaeger detached from the safety locks, in the final trigger of a launching protocol. 

The warning signs remained on the screen, a constant reminder of the anomaly that was having three pilots that wouldn’t — couldn’t — match. But they added up, together, in one single coherent curve. A sum bigger than the contribution of the three parts.

Everything else was green, and even Boyd’s expression betrayed some fascination with the process.

“ _Hangar open in three...two...one…_ ”

A high whistle, and the roof of the hangar cleared the ground for the Jaeger to advance.

By contrast, Gansey’s voice was low pitched, alluring through the loudspeakers for the whole Headquarter to hear.

“Make way for the Raven King.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


The first mission of the new Jaeger — Raven _I’m Gansey and I live for drama_ King — had been a success. 

The Shatterdome had seen operations way more epic than this even before Doomsday, while the Kaiju had escalated in brutality. The cyclone of excitement for this impossible Jaeger with its impossible team was even more annoying because of it. 

Ronan had known it was going to end like this in the very moment he figured Gansey was not going to spit his brain out, but he was _actually_ going to figure out a drift with Tweedledum and Tweedledee and leave happily ever after. 

After having taken the problem of waiting for Gansey in the pilot preparation room that same morning, Ronan should have known failure as an unlikely possibility. He still regretted not having told them they were kind of disgusting, when they all arrived through the door and the dressing up process involved seeing more hickeys on Gansey’s skin that Ronan would ever thought possible to stomach. But Gansey had been so hyperfocused — so fired up — that even Ronan was reluctant to stop on his happiness like an elephant. 

He hadn’t imagined that they would manage like this. Manage by _not managing_ , creatively.

Not even the joy of seeing Declan freaking out over an unknown process had been sufficient for Ronan to stick to the commanding bridge. He had left, once it was clear that they were going to be alright — that they were going to pilot, and Ronan would only be dressed up as if he belonged. 

For the rest of the mission, Ronan had lingered in secluded corners of the operating hall, looking from afar at the best of the Tech team assembled. 

The fact that the base was going to be obsessed with the event had been evident already then. Everyone hummed and stared, even Mechanic John Doe was captivated by the screens. There was no winning against it.

Unfortunately for God and men alike, Ronan Lynch had never learned the sublime art of not fighting for lost causes.

Five days after the most glorified junk-cleanup mission that the Shatterdome had ever seen, he slammed his dog tags on the door of the training rooms — as if just walking in its vicinity wouldn’t have sufficed — and walked in with a glare already mounting. 

“Ronan! I was hoping you would come, after all!”

Gansey’s galvanising attention was always disturbing to channel, especially when Ronan wanted to just be spiteful against it. Brotherhood and spitefulness only equated smoothly when Declan was involved. He had to stare past Gansey in full training gear, towards Henry and Blue on the sparring square with their sticks, to charge back his annoyance in full.

“Their form is shit and you’re lax as fuck.” Ronan replied, as if that was a perfectly clear explanation on why he must gift them with his presence.

“So our form is shit now but not _before_?” Henry called over, planting the bottom of his stick on the floor. 

Ronan barked out a humourless laughter. “Hell no, you were shit before too, but now you’re Dick’s _copilots_.”

The tone of the word itself made Gansey blush along the line of his neck, under Ronan’s very pointed stare. Ronan couldn’t say it was an unwanted side-effect. He wiggled his eyebrow at Gansey, until Gansey shook his head.

“So you’re here for what, teach us you jedi way?” Henry pressed on, with a low snort from Blue to his side.

“I’m here to kick your fucking ass into a new shape, that’s what I’m here for.”

“Ronan!” Gansey interjected, and this time the tone was completely different. “Not kicking of anyone’s ass.”

“Not even your ass?”

At this, Gansey tilted his head sideways considering. They had been training together since they were ten years old, and Ronan didn’t want to consider what he would do if Gansey were to deny him, to _substitute him_.

“Well, no, that’s fine,” Gansey said, instead, and it felt weirdly like something unwinding.

“Gansey, you could have just _told us_ ,” Blue singsonged, twirling her stick distractedly while Henry wolf-whistled. 

That made Gansey blush again. It wasn’t a kind of dynamic Ronan wanted anything to do with, _and yet._

He flipped a middle finger at Blue, “Fucking hilarious, now get off the square, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.”

“And what will we be doing, according to your questionable judgment?” Blue challenged.

Whatever the plan was — and in spite of his own spite Ronan actually kind of _had_ one, to be completely honest — he didn’t get to say because the doors slid open again and Helen marched inside, all flawless Corps uniform and military stance. 

“Get to the equipment and look busy, we need to talk,” she ordered, with the ease of someone who would expect nothing but a prompt reactions.

Ronan didn’t know if he resented himself for how he was already moving even through the perplexed exchange of stares that followed — particularly intense between Gansey and his sister, still eagerly communicating in half-silences as if Gansey hadn’t literally just swapped team. 

“How are we busying?” Henry dared to ask.

“I don’t know, do some pushups, Blue can do some pull-ups, Ronan and Gansey can do that big favourite of the rowing machine,” Helen countered, evidently knowing in details even though she opened in a blasè manner.

Walking through the room and to the space between three pillars, she turned her prosthetic hand around and glued a small circular device to the concrete. 

It was Ronan’s turn to have a silent but poignant exchange with Gansey. They could both recognise an electromagnetic interference device in any form known to modern technology. Helen was purposefully dampening the communications in the training rooms. When she stopped, looking at them going into the directed position, she did so with her back to the camera that would have the main visual on that corner of the room. 

For whatever reason, they were going undercover in the Shatterdome.

Still, Gansey slid in the machine with ease, just a little brush of his index finger on his lips towards his copilots — to suggest silence, and prudence, and something more that Ronan didn’t want to discern from their private and intimate connection.

Helen gave a curt nod of approval in seeing them catching up. Whatever they were doing they must listen carefully and don’t just make this a winded discussion full of back and forth. With a distracted gesture at the controller embedded in the wall, she even turned on the music, prompting them to actually _look busy_ even while they all awaited eagerly.

“I’ve got some news on our little research. Which are not really my news, but Maura seems to have contacts who have contacts who are prone to put things in discussions.” Helen begun, barely audible above the tune of the music. 

It was difficult not to tense while using the machine, but Ronan just gave a vague nod that seen from the outside might be anything and nothing.

“Henry, you might need to discuss Manila with the others. What you remember at least. Not here, somewhere,” she went on, with some very synthetic directive. “The Manila Shatterdome is the sort of smoke curtain that has been keeping us out form who Major Noah Czerny was.”

Breathing against the sudden knot twisting along his throat, Ronan pulled at the machine with more force than what was strictly needed. He didn’t look at Helen, he looked forward, forcibly, in the same way he would always do in a normal training. In front of him, Gansey looked back, and it was pretty obvious that neither of them wanted to question _who_ were they performing this charade for. 

With an appreciative hum at their laborious silence, going around as she would do while supervising a training, Helen kept talking. “Manila was that fine line that runs between accidents and spring cleaning. The whole thing is classified but officially the base was compromised and what followed was the application of some pretty brutal termination protocols. By which I mean...akin to what would have happened to the base if Kaijus had roamed free on it for a week.”

Henry was facing the floor, which was probably good because his pushups felt slightly too restless. He gritted out, “But they didn’t.”

“No, they didn’t.” Helen confirmed, easily. The music was upbeat and in plain contrast with the conversation. “Manila was also one of the first testing grounds for the implementation of the advanced drifting technology that gave us the Generation II and III upgrades of the Mark series of Jaegers. That could include most of our unique specs, like Dreamcatcher.”

Another too-enthusiastic pull, Ronan would have fluked his rhythm with Gansey if it weren’t for the fact that Gansey’s back muscles were born for this, apparently. 

“We were never in Manila,” Gansey himself pointed out, on Ronan’s behalf. The _we_ included both the Ganseys and the Lynches, who had always moved together since the first time they decided they were going to save the world or die trying. 

“And yet,” Helen countered, not very talkative but surely not missing the point that it was difficult to think of Dreamcatcher being tested somewhere were Niall Lynch couldn’t look over it day and night. “Manila was an active base for containment of Kaijus, before the fall. Only Mark-I models on record, I have no way to know if they were testing prototypes. What I know is that there are no recorded missions around the time in which the base fell.”

“Unofficially...can you contaminate with something more...human...than a Kaiju?” Blue asked, gritting her teeth against the bar she was pulling up to.

“Ding dong, possible,” Helen replied still walking around them — and casually, very casually, always with her back at every camera. “The records are messy, I can’t say for sure if we missed something apart from two Mark-I models. But I have a list of confirmed casualties and MIA.”

An icy chill ran down Ronan’s spine and he had to turn and look at Helen — he just had to — while she went on.

“Noah Czerny has been dead for seven years.”

This time, he and Gansey really sidestepped the rhythm, ending up almost crashing against each other. 

“Someone is impersonating him and challenging us to find out about this?” Gansey whispered, his knees almost touching Ronan’s.

Henry’s voice was weirdly cavernous, coming from beside him where he had lowered himself forehead to the floor — even though no pilot should ever be overworked by this little physical effort. “And that’s assuming that finding a random person in your inaccessible hutch in the middle of nowhere is more plausible, I suppose.”

It wasn’t. They all know it wasn’t.

“Coincidences,” Gansey uttered. 

“Yeah,” Ronan and Helen whispered at the same time. 

The escalations of Kaijus had been deemed as a coincidence in the Headquarter, before they gave up to recognising that the apocalypse was coming.

Blue and Henry would probably not get the shared understanding, or maybe they had — having picked from Gansey’s brain — because they didn’t ask. 

“Who are we hiding this from,” Ronan asked, in an angry rush, pushing himself back to reinstate a punishing rhythm with Gansey. He could feel the blood draining off his face and pooling in his stomach and that required some fighting against. “ _He_ said _they_ were coming. So who are we hiding from?”

“I don’t know, or I would know how to hide more successfully.” Helen said, as if it was easy. It wasn’t, but it was very likely true, and Ronan could appreciate the truth — and the fact that she had found it for them, if even in bits and pieces.

The insistent bipping of a pager arose from Helen’s beltline, effectively halting the conversation.

“Damn,” she hissed. She rushed, as if summarising. “I need to go and the frequency scrambler comes with me. Regroup on Manila. And guys...and girl...we might have a drift-related problem here.”

Disentangling from the machine in yet another spur of the moment decision, Ronan whispered after her as she went back to the pillar to remove the gadget. “Don’t say anything to Declan.”

“We do need a drifting expert for a drifting problem.” She argued, side-eyeing him.

“Not him, not like this. And look how many we are. Don’t.” He didn’t want to sound like pleading, or irrational, but Decland didn’t ask for details when Ronan hinted he saw things — he shut it off — and that must be _shady_ , for sure.

The pager beeped again and Helen huffed loudly. “For now. Discuss.” 

WIth that last order, she picked up all her stuff and turned on her heels, leaving them behind in a slide of shutting doors. Ronan could hear them all breathing heavily, in an scattered arrangement in the training rooms, and he was sure it must be more than just exertion. 

“Where do we talk?” Blue dared to ask, just barely above her breath, from where she stood next to Henry. The skin of Henry’s face had an ashen quality, his eyes averted to the side, and no sudden exercise could quite justify it.

“Well, the Shatterdome is…” Gansey trailed off with half a gesture. The Shattedrome was live and on record 24/7, it was for everyone’s safety and they all knew it — but just today, it felt like a sharp double edge to fall on to. “Maybe the showers?” 

“Fuck off, I’m not joining you in the showers,” Ronan hissed, not even too afraid of this point being eavesdropped. “Put your shoes back on, we’re going out.”

Just like that, he dragged them all the way off the main building towards the hangars. They ended up in a very remote point, until the next door Ronan opened revealed a field of old cars, motorcycles, even an helicopter. The BMW stood in front of it all, easily the most used and the one with a ready way in and out. 

“Get in,” he prompted, clicking on the keys to open the four doors.

“You know how to drive?” Blue’s skepticism towards the vehicle was broadcasting loudly from her creased forehead.

“I’m a goddamn pilot, of course I can drive.” 

Niall had always said that the Jaegers were the finest piece of machinery known to humans — that they needed a _spark of genius_ , more than just skills, to be conquered. _Everything else_ , he always told Ronan, _is the ground beneath for you to play with, but with a Jaeger you’re fighting with an equal._

The BMW was one of these lesser beings, and yet Ronan trusted it to hold the weight of his back, the driver seat perfectly calibrated for him without need for adjustments. You can’t be that familiar with something that is _beneath you_ , but Ronan figured it must be that type of comfort — or maybe just self-assurance — that came from dealing with something that could never hurt you or lash back. It would make sense.

“Where are we going?” Henry asked, from the backseat. It luckily came without questions that the only welcomed one to ride shotgun was Gansey.

“Out. To _silence.”_

They weren’t sure the BMW itself wasn’t bugged and under strict control — being parts and parcel of the Headquarter’s equipment and all. So they drove in relative silence, broken sometimes only by occasional complaints about the increasing speed Ronan was building up to. 

“Are we going out of the gates?” Gansey asked, evidently a bit lost in the crazy turns that Ronan was taking to avoid most of the buildings and put some distance from the main base. It was more paranoia than necessity, honestly.

“Nah, no need. You remember the beach?”

There was only one point, apart from the launching platforms, in which the Hong Kong Shatterdome was sort of open to the sea water without three thousands alarms triggering. Some tidal generators of electricity were there so the borders of the military zone had been expanded to the sea itself. Gansey and Ronan found the spot at fourteen years old, seven months after the Headquarter had been steadily established in Hong Kong and ten months before their first appointments as active service pilots. They had gone back there several times — sometimes too adrenalinic with victory, sometimes bored, sometimes silently cursing the ocean that kept delivering them monsters. 

“Oh,” Gansey exhaled. He looked back at Blue and Henry, who had never been there and would never really _know_ , regardless of what the drift might feed them.

“Yeah,” Ronan echoed. He would bring them there, not because he wanted to but because the stake had just rose.

“It’s a good idea, thank you.” Gansey turned back towards his copilots, bodily this time. “It’s a place Ronan and I went often. It’s nice...kind of loud, which I suppose it’s useful for us. You’re going to like it.”

They shouldn’t need to _like it_. It wasn’t theirs. Or at least they should have the good sense to like it because it was important for Gansey and Gansey had shared _his mind_ with them. Of course Ronan shouldn’t have to share something of _his own_ was well, but the hierarchy of the drift was above any law — _against the laws of Gods, if we must, Ronan_ , his father had said — and Ronan would not challenge it. 

He would not, even though he wanted to bite down on it in spite. He would not, even more so if he was half a step away from not being a pilot at all. 

Not that he would admit it.

Leaving the car was like forgoing a shell that held Ronan’s uneasiness and anger in a manageable shape. Outside, there was just the noise of the waves crashing on the high rocky pier and, above all, the turbines humming and whining under water, breaking the relatively calm morning. It was disturbing in exactly the way Ronan needed it, for reasons deeper than secrecy.

“So, what’s the deal with Manila?” He asked, in a clear cut. The fact that Henry appeared so avoidant all together only spurred him further. “Did you know about Noah Czerny already?”

“I didn’t!” Henry protested immediately, affected by the accusation because it would have meant defying the neural bridge with Gansey — considering that Ronan didn’t bother putting them in the loop before. “I was only thirteen and freshly recruited when we were there, the prototype pilots...you saw them, from afar, rather than knowing them, you know?”

Ronan didn’t, and Gansey was surely the same. They had spend their lives in close contact with whatever alpha test had ever been initiated by the Corps, not knowing a possible pilot of a prototype for them was ridiculous. And yet they hadn’t known Manila, nor Noah, before today.

“What do you remember about Manila?” Unsurprisingly, Gansey was more prone to patience and diplomatic approach, but there was also a layering of caution underneath that rang differently to Ronan. “I mean, something that tells you that Helen’s intuition might be right...or wrong...or something.”

Henry shrugged, edging away just slightly from the point in which Gansey had walked closer to him. “I don’t know, that’s very specific. And the night it all went down is...you know…”

“I know. You know I know.” Gansey completed, all to earnestly, when Henry’s sentence dropped in the middle. “I’m so sorry Henry, it’s just…” 

“No, it’s okay.” Another shrug, but this time with a smile. However, he and Blue held hands steadily when she went to stand next to him. “Floor collapsing moment is probably boring, in the big scheme of things. Everyone likes a good heist plot...which is a bit of a ghost-heist here.”

The sudden cheerfulness has something anticlimactic in itself. There was a silent exchange of stares between Blue and Gansey — so private, already, an intimate worry running through the both of them. There was no space for Ronan to interject — no place for him to be, really, in this natural order of things that included him less and less with every passing day.

“Maybe it’s relevant. That, how long they took to recover you from the cliffs…” Blue trailed off in a whisper, and the sound of the turbines swallowed the rest of the sentence away from Ronan’s ears.

“For dramatic effect, sure, but we want names and places and things, do we not?” He looked up at Ronan, unexpectedly. “Do we not?”

“How the fuck should I know?” Ronan barked out, instinctively, but still tried to think about it. “Maybe? I mean, if we need to do something, about a possible someone…”

That killed Ronan’s father and destroyed his world.

It was Ronan’s moment to trail off.

“What would be best...” Gansey took over, and it would have been easier to be grateful instead of spiteful if Gansey’s smooth way of caring hadn’t just been applied to Ronan and Henry equally. “...is to have more things we can try to track. Names, known survivors. Leftovers that might hide a track.”

Henry played with Blue’s fingers in the only sign of nervousness that filtered through a perfect wall of blasé attitude. “I think I can recognise the face of the main pilots of the Manila base but I don’t know what happened to them and I don’t have intels.” He said it, slowly, like they would do for every military report at the base. “And...well...my mother used to work for a fringe of the R&D at Manila but she kind of left the Corps after and I’m...I mean, she might sneak me some intel…”

“Absolutely not!” Ronan exploded.

“Ronan!”

“What the fuck are we here conspiring like criminals if then we go and send messages around?”

Blue’s eyebrows skyrocketed up her forehead. “You know, Lynch, we kind of know how to communicate securely. I’m the daughter of a Lieutenant General used to long distance parenting, it comes with the added bonus of how to use hidden channels.”

Ronan’s teeth clicked together at this, but Gansey had something more pensive. “That’s very good, Jane, but consider that _hidden_ always comes with the caveat...up to what security clearance?”

It wasn’t a nice train of thought, especially not with so many of them with family in the highest clearance. The implications that one of these people might be connected to some degree in what happened to Ronan’s father turned bilious in Ronan’s mouth. Still, it was a good thought — for the _better safe than fucked over_. 

“Well, okay, so no one-to-one connection to what we’re looking for. Fine. But maybe I can put up some theatrical and ask only about the pilots, before we crash against another wall of _Helen_ not having the clearance. What do you say?” Blue asked again.

For someone who had spent the totality of his teenage years in a war based on fatigue, the narrowing choices and the lack of a clear path forward weighed on Ronan more than he had imagined they would. He deferred the decision to Gansey with half a gesture — feeling like a coward, even though Gansey was an excellent tactician.

“Fine,” Gansey deliberated, after a long silence in which only the sound of the power station buzzed through them like an additional bystander to the conversation. “But be careful, leave no standing traces, and we only update each other in safe locations...yes, even the showers if we have to.”

Ronan ran his fingers through his buzzed hair, from forehead to nape, and kicked a stone. It wasn’t an opposition and he knew Gansey was aware of it. Conversely, Blue and Henry exhaled — in a disturbing synch — as if having something decided genuinely relaxed them.

This time, when Gansey walked closer towards them, Henry didn’t shy away. He smiled at Gansey, rather, almost apologetic, and their foreheads brushed together when Henry lowered his head. 

_This is wrong_ , a nagging part of Ronan’s brain suggested while he dug his nails in his napes. Drifting was not about passion, or romance, it was so much more.

 _You’re a hypocrite_ , another voice whispered him, fully aware of all the times he had seen Calla running her hand through Maura’s long hair and had luxuriated in the familiar warmth even by proxy.

In moments like this, Niall’s absence was real like a lead ball dragging him down at the end of the Ocean — ready to be swallowed by the Rim, closed or not, never to resurface. He was done grieving, he had been done grieving since the very moment he had decided with Gansey that they would get on top of this. But they were not yet on top of anything, and Ronan kept being carried aimlessly away. So alone, so purposeless.

“What are you thinking about?” Blue’s question dragged Ronan’s attention back, forcibly.

She wasn’t speaking to him, though. She spoke to Gansey, who still stood in front of the both of them but stared distractedly at the rocking of waves against the pier — mind evidently wandering even while he kept a hand on Henry’s nape. 

“Mhn?” The hum was exactly like the ones Ronan was used to hear after Doomsday — when Gansey’s brain would scatter all over the place. It was better now, even though the last few days weren’t enough for statistics — better in three. “No, just...Helen said that we might have a drifting problem. And I’m sure she counterchecked Ronan’s description, it must be believable for this Noah Czerny. So you saw Noah, or let’s say you did, right Ronan?”

Ronan lifted his eyebrow at the workaround, but he had years of experience in Gansey’s train of thought. “I was already saying that.”

“Yeah and it would be a weird name to toss around if no one even remembers it,” Blue reasoned, chaining to their previous conversation in the training rooms.

“Occam’s razor and whatnot,” Gansey nodded, caressing his hand away from Henry to rub at his lower lip. “I think that Helen was saying that if you caught sight of him in the Jaeger, it’s likely something drift-triggered. But it’s also something unknown, right?”

Standing very still, and very straight, Ronan kept his arms plastered to his sides with the sheer strength of training. He wasn’t liking the sound of this. His tongue plastered slowly on the roof of his mouth, effectively keeping him silent. Even without it, though, Ronan wasn’t sure he had very much to say — apart from _stop_ , which of course was unthinkable.

“In the high ranks, we’ve always been told that we can find what we lost….who we lost...in the drift.” Gansey filled in Blue and Henry, but kept eyeing at Ronan. 

Ronan could feel Gansey’s eyes on his cheek but refused to reciprocate the stare. _Don’t_ , he thought desperately to himself. _Don’t_.

“You found Noah in the drift.” 

A sudden wave of nausea rushed through Ronan’s body, triggered by the amorphous horror that lingered in his brain, as if he could just puke it out and be done with it. He wouldn’t of course. He tried already, in the hours and days and weeks after Niall had _ceased to be_ , annihilating from the drift and letting the remains of himself to rot in Ronan’s mind. 

“You’re not talking about this with Declan.”

Incongruently, it was all he managed to croak out. Hardly a priority and yet so much better than everything else he might have said and then regretted saying.

“Ronan…”

Ignoring Gansey, he turned on his heels, hands deep in the pockets of his uniform trousers where no one could see them shake

“I’m gonna take a walk.” He grumbled, already stalking off. “If you touch the car I’m gonna fuck you up.” 

He didn’t wait for a reply, his steps heavy in his combat boots. 

Beside him, the ocean expanded like the endless nightmare it was, full of Ronan’s monsters ready to accompany him right where there was no one able to reach him anymore.

  
  


* * *

  
  


For lack of better definitions, the protagonist of the past week had been the havoc that had been wrecked on Gansey’s mood following their conversation at the beach. 

He wasn’t so unfamiliar with fucking up — and with Ronan, sometimes, you could fuck up by virtue of breathing funny. A couple of times while they were growing up Gansey had spent a week with a swollen eye as an effect of Ronan’s policy of “fuck shit up first, explain what upset you later, if ever.” The violent outbursts became less tragic as they got older, or maybe Gansey and Ronan got better at moving in concert rather than crashing against each other. The apocalypse helped, very likely. 

In this moment, in this time, Gansey found himself almost _yearning_ for Ronan’s phenomenal right hook. It would take any edge off, a rightful punishment for a rightful hurt, and afterwards it was a matter of clearing the muddled waters, letting the resentiment settle. But Ronan didn’t hit him — not in the piers, not after. He just went back to spending long hours away from the buildings of the base, appearing claustrophobic when instead he had to roam the corridors.

Gansey feared the despair that came with it — even more so if he had been the cause of it. 

It was of little consolation even having Henry and Blue personally come to his room — which they were now authorised to access in any moment without having to page for it — to gather him up before his alarm. 

Gansey knew it was probably meant as consolation, or support. 

He had jerked awake at the first sound of the sliding door — too many years in the Corps didn’t allow for indulgence — but he had stayed in bed, seeing that it was them. Blue had kissed him good morning first, cradling his head, in a clear sign that they might be worried for him. Blue didn’t like kissing so much, and would generally reserve it for moments in which Gansey was past the reluctance of begging for it. 

It had been a nice way to wake up, much nicer than the groggy restlessness that accompanied Gansey’s mornings when he felt like he should be looking for answers but he was, uncharacteristically, not quite sure of _how to_. 

It had been nice enough to make him consider the thought of move rooms to be all together, or just carefully slither off to close the communicating door with Helen’s room and enjoy the novelty a bit more. In the end, though, his own alarm had sounded like the gong pausing a match, and Gansey had gotten up — well-kissed and with a tingle spreading up along his spine.

Resigning himself to another day of the same drills was sometimes the hardest part. 

There was no question over the fact Henry will have to wait for an auspicious moment to speak with his mother, that Helen was still scraping the bottom of her resources to try and get some answer while juggling the U.N. Moreover, trying to dig up something on very detailed drifting technology ended up in a hell of jargon that Gansey never had to decipher before. 

The best day so far had been their second mission — just as unexciting as the first one, cleaning up the same residues of Kaijus the Greywaren had been pursuing after Doomsday. The thrill in it was Raven King and Gansey’s new team.

There was a good measure of luck — and the universe taking pity of him, maybe — in the fact that ten minutes after their arrival in the training rooms, the door slid open without another round of controversial news waiting behind it, for once. 

The young man lingering at the doorframe was dressed in the most plain of the working uniforms of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps. The colours of the grades pinned at its front identified him immediately as one of the members of the Tech team. Quite a high rank, even, for someone this young. The serious expression made the guy look older — or maybe just odder, in the tension that seemed to glue him in position, neither in nor out — with hair of an indistinct half-light colour. 

They had been waiting for him.

“Adam!” Blue piped up, excitable, scrambling to stand up from the corner of the room they were using for warm-ups. She rushed to him at the door. “You finally came! Come here, come on!”

Adam Parrish, turning 22 years old this July, had been the subject of a small part of Gansey’s dossier reading. It had been a debatable mixture between wanting to know who this guy Blue had met was and luxuriating in being able to look up information and actually have a response from the system, courtesy of his clearance.

Unfortunately, Adam’s electronic folder hadn’t been endless. Still, its content had held Gansey’s attention nicely enough. 

Born in Virginia, U.S.A., which was a nice recurrence, a lot of them had family there, or at least had spent some time in the state. An excellent academic record that held great promises. Recruit in the Pan Pacific Defence Corps at 15 years old — Gansey knew that the open-call date away from the selective recruitment of the first five years coincided with the aftermath of his and Ronan’s first active mission. The offer had admittedly been conditional, the medical record reported unilateral hearing loss in the left ear — _countryside accident_ , apparently — for which the Corps had supplied a military grade hearing aid system, if the candidate remained adequate.

Adam Parrish had been more than adequate. The excellent records trailed off in the ranks — several commendation from his training officers, promptly recommended for the piloting division. Fast tracked, directly in the Headquarter training. It was the type of profile that, in Gansey’s experience, led to an operative pilot, quite high in the food chain even, by Adam’s 17 years old. But Adam’s seventeens was where the record diverged. 

There were links to a worrying series of failed pre-drifting tests, and a final attempt date that came with a notable incident report in which both Adam and the fellow recruit he had been synching with had been sent to the Medical Division. A two-week prognosis followed, warning notes from overseers that a full drifting was not recommended for the subject, several tests sent off to the Research, Development & Implementation to quantify an unprecedented level of “drifting incompatibility damage reflex”. 

In Gansey’s understanding of the reports, Adam Parrish’s mind recoiled against the drift and could easily drag everyone down with him. 

His excellent performance was taken into consideration and amiable discharge was offered in case that a conditional alternative offer was refused. Adam must have accepted what the Corps had been willing to give him because his records proceeded under the marks of the Technical division. He was now directly operating under the Chief Mechanical Tech-Officer in the Headquarter, and seeing that he had full clearance of operation and had worked up-close with both the Greywaren and the Raven King had made Gansey weirdly emotional. 

Gansey had seen Adam’s official ID picture — actually, all six ID pictures associated with his dossier, as the Corps required a yearly update. That had made Adam’s appearance not quite like one of a stranger, and yet undeniably foreign, as if nothing of the physical impact of Adam Parrish could fit through the lenses of a camera. He was, for lack of better definition, odd, with something in his fair eyebrows and the curve of his cheekbones that gave him an almost alien quality to anyone catching a glimpse of him sideways. He was nice to look at and, conversely, something in the precise way he held himself made him seemingly easy to disregard. 

With just them in the room, and Blue dragging him forward almost bodily, the attention was not going to shift from him that soon.

“Adam Parrish,” Gansey called, trailing several steps after Henry after having put away the weights they had misplaced. “You made Jane very impatient, we were all waiting for you to show up.”

The easy smile on Gansey’s face stilled into something more akin to surprise when Adam slid reflexively into attention, staring forward but not straight into Gansey’s eyes. “Good morning, Colonel.”

“Good morning. At rest.” The reply won him an outraged look from Blue and a judging lift of eyebrows from Henry. Gansey spoke again before either of them could vocalise the protest. “What, please come on. I know it’s hardly necessary but you follow the protocol to call off the protocol. Isn’t that easier?”

Even Adam was now eyeing him curiously, but actually relaxed — without clasping his hands behind his back, fortunately. Incidentally, that didn’t seem to quench Blue’s will to strangle him — Gansey did wonder how much time would have to pass for that to disappear completely.

“ _Easier_ tends to require that you put people _at ease_ not exactly in the damn, literal, pulling-rank way!”

“I’m not pulling ranks!” Gansey protested, helplessly. “Actually Parrish...Adam, maybe I can call you Adam? I go as Gansey for the most part...I wanted to say that there is no need for ranks. We were all hoping you would join us, you see.”

At some indefinite point of the whole exchange, Adam’s somber seriousness had cracked into a smile — barely there, and yet it changed something of his face towards a different type of strangeness. “I think I was the one pulling rank after all. And yes, you can call me Adam...y’...all of you, I mean.”

They shook hands, more civilian and personal, and Gansey appreciated the firmness of Adam’s grip as much as he grasped onto the faintest American drawl — not the type some of his and Helen’s relatives had, more organic, true country.

“I know I’m long overdue, actually,” Adam continued, retreating his hand neatly. “I hope I didn’t offend you, Blue, but even now I’m really not sure of me being here…”

“Blue told us you partially trained as a pilot,” Henry provided, gracefully leaving off the part in which Gansey had rattled off sections of his records while they were having a late lunch in an almost cleaned out canteen. “I think we could use some company in this room, it gets a bit repetitive day in day out...no offense, Richardman, you’re a joy and you know it.”

Gansey rolled his eyes away but still smiled, a bit embarrassed — it was somehow more obvious, after having drifted for two times, to catch Henry’s flirtatious aftertastes. He was sort of glad of having missed a lot of them in their first weeks together because it wouldn’t have been the same. 

Still, Henry had a point. Looking around the room, it rang empty and out of usage, with the pilot training program scaled down to match the scarcity of operative Jaegers or even prototypes. Emptier, even, after Doomsday. Gansey missed the days in which he was able to enter and find the full high-ranks to share the day with — even if it was a silly thing to miss, days plagued by meetings, assessments, training, nights too often interrupted by one Code Blue after another. But they had been together, and there were days in which even Blue and Henry — so close, so dear, so intense, so _matching_ — were still too novel, fresh, to counter the bleeding loss of something so sedimented in Gansey.

He should really find a way to resettle things with Ronan.

“I’m sure I am,” Gansey echoed, shaking his head distractedly. He still went and smiled at Adam, refocusing his gaze. “I can’t deny we’re lacking variety, which is not recommended in operative training. You would be doing us a favour, really...assuming we can steal you from the docks long enough to find a routine we’re all comfortable with.”

Blue huffed, grabbing Adam again by the arm and dragging him even more inside the room. “I told you he’s very good! Adam, take a stick, we should train and show them, Gansey is being insufferable.”

“I’m not!” Gansey protested, but he still let them be, going to sit at the side benches with Henry. They might as well watch this as a intro of Blue’s mysterious person, finally there in the flesh.

When Gansey glanced at him, Henry was serene and half-smiling while looking at Blue negotiating sticks and possible things to try. The smooth sparring ring was slightly under the level of the benches, to give everyone a perfect view. Gansey envied Henry’s calm, the sure way he stood as a fixture in Blue’s life. Even after two successful drifting, some sex, and the lengthening list of quiet moments shared together, it was difficult to catalogue himself in terms of “what does Blue see”. Of course it was an after-effect of Blue’s feelings being difficult to pinpoint in general — she was intense, but fundamentally disengaged, whilst Gansey often didn’t convey the obsessive quality of his mind sufficiently. Even in the drift, Blue fleeted — there and gone and back and there and slippering away at the same time. It was obviously part of her strength, of what made them capable of drifting under such duress of reciprocal circumstances, but it was still maddening for Gansey, at times. 

He almost jumped when Henry’s shoulder pressed against his own, leaning into the contact just enough that Gansey had to sustain his weight — to feel him.

“It’s okay,” Henry just murmured. _It’s just how she is_ , the undertone seemed to say.

It was a comfort and it wasn’t, in the unfair but visceral thought — or maybe more of an expectation — that Blue would let Gansey click with her, with Henry, and with their whole situation before interacting with someone else. Gansey liked changes, the adventurous thrill of them, only as soon as they didn’t shake what he was unwilling to compromise with. He loved, inevitably, the duality of Blue pursuing _something more_ while being fundamentally reluctant to drastic measurements. Everything in this was antithetic, and that, too, pained him. But he still watched her sparring with Adam Parrish from the sidelines.

Disrobed from most of the rigid part of his uniform in an approximation of training clothing, Adam stood facing away from them, barefoot and with just an undershirt and rolled up trousers. He was as careful as he had been at the door, as if to not disturb an environment in which his presence was still debatable. It was a nice contrast with Blue, basically dressed like a civilian in a shirt that, she had proudly proclaimed, she had discoloured herself, and a series of pins keeping her dark hair away from his face. When they clicked their stick together, just wood against wood in the most traditional of ways, the gesture was playful because Blue made it so.

“He’s actually good, Blue was right.” Henry murmured to him, while they watched them spar across the square floor. 

“He is,” Gansey confirmed, a slight tilt of his head while he rested fully on the backrest of the bench. “Very contained, though.”

There was no denying that excellent records weren’t the result of lucky circumstances, and that in the three years since he left the piloting division Adam Parrish must have been practicing daily, at the very least. He had an elegant form and moved through known drills with a honed perfectionism — Helen would appreciate, and admittedly Gansey did as well. By contrast, Blue made an art out of approximation, instinctual in a way that wasn’t often as pondered as her self-declared _sensible approach_ should allow for.

The net result was a sparring that went on in funky little bouts — a _conversation_ , as the women of Team Fox would often refer to it, which wasn’t exactly stilted but didn’t really push any of them past their limits. No oversharing.

It was a silly joy, in Gansey’s mind, to assess that Adam and Blue could possibly achieve a passable level of drift compatibility but would not be considered optimal for operative purposes. Certainly not like Henry and Blue, who sparred with each other like maniac tricksters, and not like Blue and Gansey, who had pushed each other at the edge of the ring over and over again, powered by insistence. 

At the end, Blue had landed Adam to the ground two times, and make him misstep outside of the corner of the sparring grounds once, so she emerged on top of their five-rounds set. She was rightfully satisfied with herself, and Adam was genuinely complimenting in his politeness. Blue came up towards the benches while nudging ironically at Adam’s arm with her shoulder — a good ten centimeters lowers than Adam’s. Gansey couldn’t help but mull over what Adam could have done differently. If only he had been more fluid. 

“Come on, Three-thirds-over-three, stop brooding and let’s give them a change.” Henry physically dragged Gansey up with a grip on his nape — his hands warm and _known_ , even if not yet familiar, in a way that tingled over Gansey’s chest.

“Okay, okay, fine. Jane, would you pass the stick?” 

“You can always get the stick.” She wiggled her eyebrows but send it flying over for Gansey to catch.

It arrived point first, as if she was trying to hit him with a javelin, but Gansey still caught it in the middle. “Dear God, please...Adam, I apologise, I would like to say they aren’t always like this but.”

“Shut up, you love us.” Henry countered, exchanging places with Adam in a much more orthodox way.

To this, Gansey had no reply but an sideways smile. Adam was eyeing them curiously — or maybe not curiously, there was a weird intensity in his stare. He had mostly followed the exchange between Blue and Gansey, and now he looked at Gansey distractedly spinning the stick in his hands to adjust the height of the grip incrementally without letting it go.

“Nice catch,” Adam just murmured, with clear appreciation and something more. But then he went to sit down with no further comment and left the ground to Gansey and Henry.

Even with the same amount of standard rounds, Gansey knew without having to check the clock that he and Henry burnt through them faster from the beginning — and even faster still after Gansey had pushed Henry on the ground once, and Henry had landed him on his shoulder right after. The thing with Henry is that he was deceptively strong in his lean tallness and he knew how to use it — even more so when he could out-maneuver Gansey with it. At the end, they ended up in a weird tie — stick against stick in a way that neither of them managed to budge, and when Gansey drove a leg forward to avoid Henry skipping over, Henry twisted an arm to the side, locking Gansey’s elbow into position. 

“Damn you, I knew you would do this,” Gansey hissed, finding Henry very close to his face at the other side of the two crossing sticks.

“Same reversed, Ganseyman,” Henry gritted over a smile, exerting himself to keep the position — he always said to Gansey that his arms and shoulders were _unfairly_ strong. He looked down at Gansey’s lips and then back to his eyes, and it was only because it wasn’t the first time that Gansey’s grip didn’t slip, following a stray thought of a very different nature. 

“Call it even?” Gansey suggested. 

“Just because we have guest,” Henry conceded, clicking his tongue half suggestive. 

Gansey hated it and loved it and wanted it, but _not now._

They released the position at the same time and Henry was already meeting him halfway with the first bump he knew was coming. 

“Two-to-two and left hanging because Richard Gansey won’t play with me anymore.” Henry lamented, as if the decision hadn’t been mutual. “Parrish, you up?” 

Adam was, indeed, shaking away from something analytically rapturous to go and take the stick over from Gansey. 

“I liked that step-work. The one that you did before changing direction midway through. But it seems tricky not to lose rhythm.” Adam commented, somewhat eager, prompting Gansey to stop in his pass-over.

“It can be, it depends how you put your weight on the ball of your feet. Nice catch, though,” Gansey echoed him, figurative where Adam had been literal earlier. “I can show you, later.”

“Yes, please,” Adam stressed on catching the offer almost before Gansey was finished talking. Then he rushed to join Henry with a bit more enthusiasm.

Henry and Blue were a bit more freestyle in picking up what they wanted — which matched them, their fighting, their drifting. But it meant that it had been long since Gansey had taught anything to anyone just for the pleasure and the honour of passing knowledge. Maybe Adam Parrish would really work extensively, as a distraction.

What had been _honestly not bad_ with Blue turned _more messy_ with Henry. Adam was still as talented — if restrainedly so — but he and Henry appeared to frustrate each other, never quite getting when to engage and when to step back. It was the type of frustration that make Adam withdraw more, unsure of what to do especially when Henry played his best wild-card moves. Gansey caught him, a couple of times, crafingly imitating moves he had seen Gansey use — if just once — but he never really got the timing right from Henry, even though he could have had. He must be a very fast thinker, though, and by this point Gansey was really entertaining the thought of sparring with him personally with some insistence. Maybe they wouldn’t stumble into _Colonel present, to attention_ situations, now that they were all warmed up and adrenalinic. 

“We should really work on this some more, man,” Henry declared, after having floored Adam five times over five. Still, when he offered his hand to pull him up, Adam accepted.

“I’m sorry, I was a bit off track and I know it.”

“You don’t even know the track, Parrish, but that’s the point of trying again,” Henry winked, which with Adam never seem to get a fluid reaction.

Blue got up again before Gansey could propose that Adam finished his iterations with the Raven King team with the himself as the only remaining member. It wasn’t that bad of an idea, though, as the three of them in the ring ended up in a bit of a more chaotic-playful situation — Adam uncertain but dragged around by Blue and Henry who were swapping one stick between the two of them. It wasn’t really like when Gansey sparred with three — that did turn in sheer madness, even more so when they had a stick each — but it was good. It seemed to loosen Adam’s nerves where they had build up in the previous exchanges, and Gansey only noticed that Adam had been wound up when that tension eased. Seeing Henry and Blue laughing, and Adam tentatively smiling, Gansey caught himself smirking as well. 

It wasn’t bad.

“Dick, what the fuck is this?! Did we turn into a goddamn kindergarten?”

A barking voice coming from up the bleachers grated the walls, stopping anyone in their track.

Ronan had always liked the secluded upper entrance to the training rooms, the one only high ranks had clearance to enter and exit through the dogtags. Distracted as he had been with the shenanigans on the sparring ground, Gansey had no way of knowing when Ronan had arrived — just that it must have been long enough to put him in a phenomenally foul mood.

Gansey sighed, looking up to him. “Good morning to you, Lynch. No, we’re still training, but we have a guest and having a good time is recommended.”

In training clothes that were already sticking to Ronan’s skin as if he had run lapses through the whole ground of the Headquarters — big enough to account for multiple marathons — Ronan had the disastrous expression of someone who hadn’t slept for days and was smashing his head against the unmovable walls boxing in his life. Gansey fought against the urge to get up from the bench, knowing that it would immediately escalate the situation further. 

The odds for this morning had just plummeted from unexpectedly positive to brutally negative.

“We’re not having dinner with General Mummy, fucking _spare me_ , we don’t have time to lose.”

The growls were directed to Gansey and Gansey alone, ignoring all the others as if Ronan didn’t even want to account for their presence. At the corner of Gansey’s eyes, he could get a glimpse of Blue and Henry moving closer to him — which he had no way to tell them _not to_ , without Ronan noticing. Adam was perfectly still exactly where he had been left, uncomfortable.

Gansey sighed. “Ronan, this is Adam Parrish, current Grade 1 Tech Officier, but former fast track for piloting division. Which is to say he knows what he’s doing and including him in the training…”

Ronan interrupted him midway through, growing more furious by the second. “We don’t take _fucking guests_ , this is a _pilot_ place, not a motherfucking charity!”

The escalation of profanity, with an accent that diverged from standard international English towards an Irish one was an unmistakable call for Gansey to do something more drastic than attempting to defuse the tension. Unfortunately, before he could put any half-formed plan into action, he heard Henry inhaling beside him and he knew — he just _knew_ — it was going to get _worse_. He tried to signal him to stop, with a sharp nudge against Henry’s arm, but Henry was already talking.

“You know gatekeeping is a slippery slope, right, Lynch?” There was an edge in Henry’s voice too, worrying. “Do you want to hold a debate of how we define a pilot, mh?”

Silence lingered for one second too long, after the clear provocation. Ronan blinked, half stunned over bloodshot eyes, circled purple by lack of sleep, as the meaning of the words sedimented layer after layer. It was like witnessing a crack widening without being able to hold it together — and years over years Gansey knew, intimately, that this was akin to spitting on holy ground.

From fundamentals to established definitions, an operative pilot was required to be assigned to a team and to a Jaeger and be capable of responding to a Code Blue or analogous, should the need arise. Ranking was appointed on a clear reflection of compliance to this statue.

Colonel Ronan Niall Lynch never officially stepped down from his association with Greywaren but stood without a drift companion and unable to respond to any call.

Gansey withdraw his hand from Henry’s arm, sharply.

“Ronan…” He broke the silence, but Ronan had already snapped out of his stupor, thunderous as a cosmic catastrophe unleashed on the world. 

Ronan tumbled down the steps of the bleachers, building momentum like an avalanche, and for a second Gansey — as well as likely everyone — was sure he was coming down to smash Henry’s face in. But instead he picked up a stick that stood innocently on the rack, just within reach from the high stand, and brought it with him in the jump over, landing heavily on the sparring ground.

In full defiance of rules more sacred than religion, he purposefully dragged the soles of his combat boots on a wooden surface that never, ever, in the over ten years Gansey and Ronan frequented training grounds, had been walked on with shoes. 

“Adam Parrish, the guest,” Ronan hissed, voice crackling like thin ice after being stepped on. “You wanna play at pilot? Let’s try with an A-grade pilot.”

Gansey swore under his breath, all too acquainted with the explosive quality of Ronan’s rage. It would have been easier, to step between them, if Adam had said something — or just stalled, hesitated, done nothing. 

Instead, in the face of the obvious danger of a malevolent Ronan Lynch primed for destruction, Adam didn’t look to the rest of them for aid and just twisted his stick, on guard diagonal across his body. Defensive, to an almost distressing level. 

As most things in the Shatterdome, sparring came with rules and protocols, some garnish lended from a variety of martial arts that sedimented into tradition in the course of the last decade. Here, now, there was no formal salutation, no presentation of the weapons, no inane movements to get the _dialogue_ going.

Announced just by the squeak of his soles on the floor, Ronan charged forward in two spins, building momentum all too suddenly. 

He landed on the side that Adam had, supposedly, more covered by the stick, but the strength of the blow just pushed past it, sending Adam flying on the floor. 

Adam fell stiffly, too wary of the sudden violence to be fluid, stripped of too many rules to be calibrated. The wooden stick jumped off his hand, rolling beside him.

“You let go.” Ronan towered over him, hissing sharp like a blade. “Is that what you would do in a Jaeger? Drop your fucking handlers? You _never_ let go, do you think this is a game?”

It was hard to hear it, like this, right now. Niall Lynch used to say it to every recruit that ever ended through his wringers — to Gansey and to Ronan too, back in the days. But it had been years, and years, since either of them ever dared to drop a sparring stick.

Adam didn’t reply, which rang uncharacteristic for someone who seemed so conscious of ranks and proper etiquette. He stared up at Ronan — at him and then not quite — bringing the _contained_ that Gansey had already flagged very close to a proper _freeze_. 

“Get the fuck up!”

“Ronan!”

“What, I thought we wanted to train all together like a fucking social project, mhn?!”

This was evidently going towards a disaster but yet again Adam broke the rhythm of Gansey’s reasoning with the devil unleashed, also known as Ronan.

Without breaking eye contact, Adam stretched one hand backwards and grasped at this stick again, getting up with careful moves. 

Ronan refocused on him like a bird of prey on a hunt. He charged again with no warning, no half-pause, and this time he did it head-on. Gansey was all-too-familiar with the half stepping that brought Ronan’s knee up and then brutally down, with the stick following in a flash. The fact that this time each of Ronan’s movement was announced by a drag of the soles didn’t serve as a full preparation for someone who didn’t know him as intimately as Gansey.

Adam countered this one better, a sharp spin of his stick to deviate the blow away from his face, but Ronan forced the resistance, pressing on his side and standing wide legged. Ronan’s stick lined up to Adam’s side, and Ronan pushed bodily to the left, sending him flying again. 

Bulky, strong, surprisingly flexible, very fast, and never, ever afraid to get to the hit. There were very few things Niall Lynch hadn’t carefully polished to perfection in his offspring during the years. 

Ronan clicked his tongue, dismissively. “Tell me again he knows what he’s doing, Dick, or do I need to clean the floor with his face more?”

“Ronan, this is _enough_.” Gansey stressed on the word, stepping past Henry — who he was fairly cross with — towards the rack with the sticks. “You get off there or I’ll get you off that.”

“ _You_ can fucking try, unlike these goddamn amateurs you keep picking up like strays!”

Stick in a hand, Gansey turned around to glare at Ronan, who was looking back at him, too furious not to be absolutely _shattered_. 

Then, Adam leveraged on a bent leg and spun half on the floor. The hit landing behind Ronan’s knees was there and gone in a second, and the effect of surprise actually made Ronan lose his stance — projected forward and forced to dampen the fall one handed, his own stick spinning to get him back up. 

It was right on time, as Adam was already pressing forward on the weakened side. Ronan barely manage to parry it, his arms tensing in absorbing the hit. 

The slightest hint of surprise glinted in Ronan’s face. “Oh, so you do wanna play.”

“What, you think it’s a game?” Adam countered, between gritted teeth. 

Their sticks slid together with a little whistle and Adam aimed for Ronan’s stomach, fearless. He would have even gotten through, but Ronan jumped up one-legged, in a smooth flow of muscles. 

Adam was scowling, for lack of better definition of the layered shadows that passed through his face, and his mouth was white at the edges from thinning his lips too hard. He was different, like this — forlorn but in a contrary way, like a tree climbing its way back from a cliff edge, root after root after root. Sharper. 

Gansey could see Ronan assessing him just as Gansey himself assessed him. Maybe the fact that Ronan was evidently being egged on by the whole situation was just another agent of today’s chaos.

There were no further words, no recognition of where this lawless thing was going. 

Ronan charged up towards Adam again but this time Adam attacked back, and they clashed against each other in a worrying noise of wood against wood. 

It looked straightforward, but it wasn’t, and Adam must have gauged he would never be able to out-bulk Ronan because his weight was shifting to the side at the very moment of the impact. Driving the energy of it away and twisting Ronan’s arm off by the crossing of their sticks. 

Ronan’s left arm reached backwards, suddenly, and for a split second it was evident that Adam hadn’t expected the vice grip to come like this — so precariously, from a non-dominant side. Then Ronan was bending forward and projecting Adam across his back — just one hand and the stick pressed on Adam’s shin as leverage.

The impact of Adam’s back hitting the floor shook in the silence of the room, brutal enough to make even Henry gasp slightly.

But this time, Adam hadn’t let go of the stick, still grasping furiously in his right hand.

“Was that a standard manuveure? Too bad I was there when we _compiled them_ ,” Ronan snarled, with clear derision. 

Adam’s reply was pushing the stick forward, with a brutal aim to Ronan’s throat. Ronan had to grab on the stick itself and bend backwards, to avoid it. 

Just like this, they were at it again. 

They went hard at each other, fast-paced and urging. Gansey, who had wanted to intervene, stood uncertain between Blue and Henry, drowned by the litany of the sticks — sliding and hitting and sliding and shielding. 

_Tac tac tatatac tactac._

They chased each other through the whole sparring ground, back and forth. There were several moments Gansey was _sure_ one of them was going to get projected on the concrete by the other, but the moment never came. There was always a last-second recovery, keeping the dynamic going. 

Adam was steadily losing his perfectly-honed form. At first, Gansey thought it was for fatigue, the effort of keeping up the pace while Ronan kept ramping everything up like a crazy race. It would have been perfectly fair but it went on for too long and Adam wasn’t collapsing — he was sweaty, breathing deeply, but so was Ronan. At that point, Gansey just thought he was getting sloppy, frustrated by the difficulty of getting a hit sideways and keep getting dodged, deviated, jerked around. But again, Ronan was surprisingly not plastering him to the ground every ten seconds so, if anything, the same frustration should run both ways. 

Eventyally Gansey saw him up close and it was clear. Adam planted his stick on the ground with a bang, perfectly vertical, and leveraged on it for that little jump that it took him to avoid Ronan locking him between one arm, his own stick and the edge of the ring. He was flushed, and focused, ignoring the rest of the world. This was Adam, out of composure. Adam Parrish, unleashed. 

“Hell, he’s good,” Henry whispered, mesmerised by the view and evidently not feeling any compunction over having ignited this spectacle.

“I _told you_ he was good!” Blue remarked, but kept her eyes on them as well, as they moved back in the centre of the ring. She muttered, under her breath, “Yes, go, _kick his ass._ ”

If Adam hadn’t yet kicked Ronan’s ass was because they were trying too hard to kick each other’s ass. It was everything they always advised against in training: not a conversation, too violent in trying to outdo each other, actually delivering the hit rather than consciously trying for balance. And yet — _and yet_ — Gansey found himself rubbing at his lower lip.

In the centre of the ring, Adam had forgone each and every standard posturing for something more fluid that fitted him perfectly — wild, cunning. Notch after notch, he had evidently rebalanced how he wanted to counter Ronan based on _Ronan himself_ — combat boots on training ground included. 

At some point, he leaped off the ground, tracing a semicircle with his body around Ronan stick, and hit Ronan in the back. Then, as soon as Ronan stumbled, he went to double it on his legs. Ronan barely avoided him, flipping backwards and landing on the ground arm first — stick and hands alike, never letting it go — feet seconds. 

For a split second, something admiring flashed in Adam’s stare, and Ronan’s too was too heated, while he spun his stick in his hands to put it back in guard. 

“Jaegers don’t fly,” Ronan hissed. 

Only Gansey, probably, recognised it for the Niall Lynch’s quote that it was. They heard it, over and over in the years, while Niall drilled off the habit of every athletic teenager to leap off their feet and bend over backwards. _It’s bad for your instincts,_ he used to say, _you’re pilots, not a shitty martial arts movie, feet on the ground like your Jaeger_. 

Uncaring of the heavy meaning behind the sentence, Adam just shrugged, breath heavy. “Well, neither do you.”

He leaped off again, light and elated.

“Jesus Christ,” Gansey heard himself whisper, as Ronan and Adam’s efforts renewed.

An intervention was probably needed because they were going to break their bones at the very least. 

Except they weren’t, and even though the rhythm at which their stick hit had built up, it became more prominent that they constantly countered each other, rather than landing on skin. Gansey grasped his own weapon tighter, honestly not sure of what do make of this — what to do with it.

Then there was a moment, sneaky and deceptive but undeniably there, in their step-hit-step-turn sequence. Gansey saw it as if his own mind was nitpicking it, Adam’s leg crossing with Ronan’s stick, Ronan’s leg crossing with Adam’s leg, Adam leveraging again to turn away from the deadlock. They were both looking at each other but the movement was perfectly coordinated, just enough strength, just the right distance.

“Oh…” Gansey whispered. 

“Mhn?” Blue hummed beside him, following intensely.

And when Adam turned around, for a moment they were shoulder against shoulder, and Ronan’s body accompanied the movement before jerking around himself and regain the furious sparring.

“ _Oh._ ” 

This wasn’t a truth Gansey knew how to explain to them. He didn’t have words for how it was to spar with Ronan — to do it well, even, and yet catching that there was always something too mutable in him, too wild, to find a right match. He had even less words for how it had been, for Ronan and Niall — perfect because his father would make Ronan perfect, because he had brought him up in his image and in his image Ronan would always _fit_. 

But this was different.

“Are they ever gonna stop?” Henry’s question, by this point, was incredibly sensible.

For a bit, the answer appeared to be _no_ , even while a real fatigue of excessively prolonged fight was really starting to kick in — slowing them down, softening the hits.

Then, abruptly, they did. 

As the frenzy eased, Adam’s stick found the back of Ronan’s left knee, but this time they were face to face. He pulled up, diagonally, and Ronan’s leg followed — helplessly at first, projecting him on the floor before Ronan could take control of the fall. By the time he did, the top of Adam’s stick was pressing on his sternum, and it was a perfect pin.

But, conversely, Ronan’s knee was pressed on Adam’s chest and the tip of Ronan’s stick tilted Adam’s chin upwards in a movement as sneaky as the bite of a reptile. 

With his eyes turned down, Adam looked down at Ronan, and Ronan looked back. They were both completely out of breath, their exposed skin reddened in multiple points where they had hit each other too much. It would bruise, and it must ache, but that didn’t seem to be a problem.

“You _do know_ what you’re doing,” Ronan whispered, and it would have been lost if the training rooms hadn’t been big enough to echo. 

“You _are_ an A-grade pilot,” Adam countered, just as low — just as private, even though it wasn’t. 

Through the pressure of the stick on his chest, Ronan chuckled. Adam leaned forward to rest against the wood under his chin, and grinned back, asymmetrically. 

“Oh, shit,” Blue echoed Gansey very belatedly. Henry nodded enthusiastically, following the unexpressed train of thought. It didn’t matter that Gansey didn’t explain, by this point.

It would be obvious to any pilot, even the most mediocre, that Ronan and Adam were drift compatible. 

But people talking around them was enough to pop the bubble that had kept the two of them entranced through all their match. 

Adam stumbled backwards and looked around, uncertain and with some evident struggle in putting back a more approachable composure in a place in which he wasn’t still sure he was _welcomed_.

Ronan dragged himself up with one last squawking of boots’ soles. The wooden surface was a disaster of black traces and dirt, as if Ronan were a car speeding off and burning wheels to mark the asphalt. 

Though Adam stayed silent, Ronan swore for the two of them, starting with an emphatical, “Fuck,” and going on in a mumble of indiscernible profanity.

He didn’t wait for a discussion, he didn’t even wait for the sensation to drop. Abandoning the stick with a clatter on the floor, Ronan left the room in a rush.

“I…” Adam hesitated, picking up Ronan’s stick alongside his own and leaving it to the side of the ring, as if it changed anything or there could be something inconspicuous about this. “I’ll find a way to clean the floor. Sorry.”

It was a good enough proposition to be repurposed as a plan, and even though Blue called after him Adam exited as well. The effort of waiting enough for that tornado called Ronan Lynch to disappear was a nice, maybe not so inadverted, touch. 

“Dear Lord,” Gansey murmured, tossing away his stick as well, when he, Blue, and Henry found themselves alone.

Maybe the day had actually improved, all things considered, but a raging headache pulsing at Gansey’s temples seemed to ask, _at what cost?_

_And, more importantly, for how long?_

  
  


* * *

  
  


It took Ronan a whole 36 hours and some, to cave.

He didn’t _want to_ , he wasn’t planning for it, he didn’t even consider it to be the point, but it still felt like caving. And Gansey and his team must have thought exactly the same — that they were facing some degree of surrender — when after months of refusal to ever do so Ronan joined them at the canteen table for dinner. 

Gansey had always had the courtesy of never pointing out when one of their fights was defusing _just because_. Maybe it was just guilt from Gansey’s part, even though a part of Ronan argued that here the problem was _Ronan_ and Ronan only. Blue and Henry didn't share the same attitude, eyeing Ronan like he just handed them some sort of victory, but it was a sign of affection towards Gansey the fact that they didn’t make this into a _conversation_ — or a shouting match.

After a silent dinner in which he listened to them chatter like newlyweds, it took Ronan even longer to give up the point that annoyed him the most, lodged somewhere in his neck — or maybe somewhere in his arm, starting from where he was painted purple by a stick crashing on him. 

“You’re the one who met him first, right?” He murmured to Blue, while they put down the trays in the rack next to the kitchen.

Blue looked up at him, one eyebrow lifting up, and up, and for a terrifying moment Ronan was sure she was going to namedrop _him_ like this — in vain, at the end of the dinner. 

“Yes,” she said, instead. “It was late at night and the spare parts sections of the working hangar for extensive Jaeger maintenance.”

It was specific, and detailed, and Ronan had the terrible impression she had rehearsed what to do with Gansey — just so that she could say the perfect thing _when_ Ronan caved.

He grunted something inconsequential and averted his gaze, trailing off for the rest of the night rather than waiting and see whatever the trio might propose him for after-dinner activities. 

_This is ridiculous,_ he thought to himself, going to the hangar section. He eyed the two biggest area, where Greywaren and Raven King had undergone most of their recent improvement. Resolutely, he went over it. It was ridiculous, so he picked up the car and drove off.

 _This is ridiculous_. And it was, definitely, as Ronan found himself yet again at the tidal turbine spot on the seaside. He tried not to think of anything, and failed. He thought of too many things at once and still failed. Through the chaos in his head, Adam Parrish’s insistence and ruthlessness while sparring felt like the only clear thread running through his mind.

 _This is ridiculous_ , and it was still, much later, when he barged into the hangar Blue had indicated him and didn’t stop until he was in a zone that matched the description. It was even more ridiculous still, because Ronan had no reason for toying around like this — just that his mind never stopped, and yet sometimes it did.

All the lights were in night mode, a low hue glowing through the hangar and guiding the steps clearly enough, but with a widespread energy-saving protocol active. There was no one around until he find it — a weird circle of spare parts and a figure moving around it, hitting objects with drills that would have made any instructure smack a commendation on the performance.

It was the right person, but not the right performance, as far as Ronan was concerned.

“Parrish,” he called, breaking the silence of the depot. 

It was ridiculous, being so self-conscious of knowing the name of Mechanic John Doe without having ever looked at it — he could have had, but it had felt too wrong, and now instead he was just there and Ronan _knew._

Adam stiffered with uncertainty, and didn’t relax properly not even when he assessed Ronan’s presence with his eyes. “Lynch…”

It wasn’t a greeting, it wasn’t a question, it was frustrating to try and catch the implication of what ran under. Ronan didn’t want it to be frustrating, on top of ridiculous.

“Spar with me?” He blurted out, blunt like a gunshot, and remembered to make it a question just belatedly. 

That, apparently, cracked something in Adam’s nicely constructed public persona. He blinked at Ronan, owlishly.

Ronan wanted to dig a grave for himself, at this point.

“Or don’t, whatever, okay,” he growled, a little lower, humming down his throat. 

He was just about to skip off, and forget that this thing ever existed — as most things at night loved to do, disappearing at the break of dawn. But Adam stepped sideways.

“Lynch.”

When Ronan turned at the call, there was a stick flying towards him — very far from a proper training equipment, made of metal and very unbalanced, but at least sturdy enough to be of some use. Ronan caught it mid air, and at that gesture — for reasons unknown to Ronan — Adam stared him even more intensely.

“What?” Ronan snarked, after too many seconds of silence followed. 

Adam unglued and shrugged, rolling his shoulders back. There was a little smirk, in the dark, slowly tugging his lips and morphing his expression. Charging it, and rumbling into the back of Ronan’s mind like the echo of a thunder.

“Bring it on.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 4 will be out on **Saturday May 25th**
> 
> In the meantime, find me on [my Tumblr](http://seekthemist.tumblr.com), to scream about this universe and more!
> 
> Your kudos, comments and flying pigeons of appreciation give me life!


	5. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 4 is likely what A LOT of you have been waiting for, apart from being one of my favourite chapters in this whole madness. 
> 
> Get ready for TheFeels©, hold your Explicit Sexual Content tag tight, but also be aware that there will be a canon level of referenced child abuse in this chapter.
> 
> Apart from that, get ready to blast the Pacific Rim theme, and I'll see you in the end notes for some announcements.

  
[[[ [YET ANOTHER poster art provided by the awesome Rachel (purrsnicket)! It's perfect for this chapter!](https://purrsnicket.tumblr.com/post/185131834048/aaand-the-second-poster-for-seekthemists-amazing) ]]]  


  
  
  


The Tech Team had a whole section of the Shatterdome assigned for the sleeping quarters, and though they were not _strictly_ going for a militar approach within their ranks the rooms were still divided for speciality — wiring, nuclear, interfaces, mechanicals, weaponry. The list was as long as the protocols for keeping the Jaegers running and fully functional in their full destructive — protective — power. 

The main perks of having been promoted all the way up the ranks of the specialists to work directly under Boyd was that Adam had a private room — only a bathroom to share, located to the left between his and Quaraishi’s room. That, and the relative leeway in the way he wanted to perform tasks, his contributions valued even though being a Tech hadn’t been his original aim in life.

But then again, maybe he should have guessed that he would never get the grim out of his hands. Not really, not after the first time he had changed a car’s fuse in the trailer park, and someone handed him a tenner that had kept his twelve years old self going while his father’s anger defused.

His back ached and his knees were stiff. Not even flopping down on the bed, finally barefoot and with the layered work clothes off, abated the feeling completely. 

Adam had barely closed his eyes, his mind still whirring exhaustedly even in the darkness, when a low _truuuu_ hummed through the narrow four walls. With a low groan, and without asking any report, Adam pressed a hand on the dialogue screen beside the bed, allowing for the door to open. 

Evidently he must discuss the team’s performance with Boyd _now_ , whether he liked it or not. 

He pulled himself up, ready to turn the lights back in day-mode. 

An imposing figure strided in the room as if he owned it, or was about to conquer it in battle. 

It was not Boyd, and the recognition tugged at Adam’s nape even before the switch left the both of them looking at each other in plain light. 

Ronan Lynch was here.

He looked weird in Adam’s room, but from every time Adam got a glimpse of him through the years he knew that Ronan looked weird _everywhere_ , as if no place could actual fit him in his glory, contain him in his nature. Everywhere but the piloting hutch of a Jaeger. And — Adam had recently discovered — everywhere but a training ground, or an approximation of thereof.

“Nice place, if you can fit yourself in a recess. Come out and spar with me.” 

If someone had told Adam a couple of weeks before that he would get weirdly familiar with all the intonations Colonel Ronan Lynch, pilot of Greywaren, could give to _spar with me_ , Adam would have laughed in their face. 

“No,” he said, just as unthinkably. He didn’t even bother to get up from the bed, or break this very Ronan’s habit of not greeting another human being _ever_. “I just got off from a shift that ran forever.”

Ronan brought himself around with all the attitude of a high-ranking operative — official _world saviour_ , even — but he absorbed the refusal even though nothing in his tone had gave hints that it was a contemplated outcome. And he registered the further explanation even though he hadn’t explicitedly requested it. 

“Yeah, I know, I was looking for you before.” Ronan kept pacing around the room, like a panther in a cage, just as full in restless energy. 

And in this state, Ronan Lynch was seeking Adam Parrish out — specifically.

“Good, then you know that unlike _someone_ here I was working,” Adam countered, as if it was natural rather than surreal to be able to clap back at one of Ronan’s slaps. “I need to sleep.”

Ronan scowled phenomenally, not at the implication that he hadn’t anything to do with his life, but rather at the notion of sleep. Considering the dark circles around his eyes — making the blue strike out, the clean cut of his features sharper — one could have thought sleep personally offended him. “Jesus, Parrish.”

Adam waved him off and let himself fall back down on the bed. The ceiling was still the same but it felt a bit less claustrophobic like this, somehow. 

“How much do you need to sleep for, then?” Ronan pressed on, when it was evident that Adam was not going to aid the argument for argument’s sake. It was a weird question.

“Mhn, don’t know.” The clock on the wall-tablet beside the bed read 15.02. Adam had been up for ten hours already. “Say three hours?”

Any sensible person would have left, or something. Ronan Lynch sat down on the floor beside Adam’s bed, glancing at him as if Adam was the one likely to do something _odd_. “Okay then, I’ll wake you in three hours.”

Ronan was going to stay. 

It had been one and a half years since Adam had shared his room with someone, and back into the full-on Kaijus War the Techs hard worked 24 hours shifts, so his roommate will come in as Adam headed out, and _vice versa_. 

He blinked. _I have an alarm and I know how to use it_ was a perfectly sensible comeback. It would work, Adam could go find him in three hours, they could even meet in the training rooms. 

“No extra pillows here,” he said, instead, but tossed Ronan a blanket that was only useful in the middle of the night. 

Ronan caught it mid-air — as he had caught anything Adam ever tossed him, unless they had been fighting dirty and it was more clever to dodge it — and left it half open on his legs. It felt like a sleepover, or at least how Adam had imagined sleepovers since his childhood. Only weirder. 

“No need,” Ronan declared, and took off the jacket of his uniform, balling it up as if it didn’t sport the shiny badges of a Colonel. 

When he flopped down to lie on the floor, he disappeared from Adam’s field of vision — just a bit, just over the edge of his mattress. 

It was weird. 

Thinking of the lines under Ronan’s eyes, almost purple, Adam turned the night-mode back on.

Maybe, in the weirdness, they could both sleep a bit. It certainly couldn’t hurt the ambassador of Chronic Insomnia Land — impossibly there, in a room barely wider than an Hong Kong low alley. 

They didn’t speak anymore. Ronan was uncharacteristically well-behaved towards the schedule that Adam had almost imposed, rather than negotiating it. 

Fatigue still tingled at the side of Adam’s eyes, and the seconds spread and diluted. He spaced in and out of consciousness, realising the blur only when the ceiling came back into focus suddenly. And yet, he couldn’t just let go. 

Ronan was breathing, beside him, down on the floor. It was a slow rhythm, controlled, only occasionally deepening like a sigh. Adam found himself wondering about Ronan usually breathed — there was too much to focus on when Ronan was moving, talking, generally existing rather than being forced to rest. He knew how Ronan’s breathing was when they were sparring, though, when they had pushed each other far enough that no amount of training could stop the heaving. The small sigh was new, though. _Is it exclusive to my floor?_ The thought lingered, delirious, while Adam’s eyes batted. 

He turned to his side, slowly, closer to the edge of the bed. He could get a glimpse of Ronan like this, without having to blatantly peek over to do it.

In the dark hue of the night-mode, Ronan looked surreal. More surreal than usual, because there was something _savage_ about Ronan Lynch that always made wonder and worry linger — _Is this being supposed to be here?_ One could ask. But _supposed to_ never concerned Ronan and he just _was_. And since he was, there will be _consequences_.

Ronan was turned on his side as well, a stiff curve as he appeared to press back against the floor as hard as the floor could be pressing against him. His left ear caught a slant of light, jutting out the buzzed-cut curve of his head. It guided Adam’s gaze lower, along the curve of Ronan’s left shoulder. The first impact were always the muscles — would always be, probably — and it felt incongruent to see them _defenceless_ when Adam was becoming harshly well-acquainted with the strength they were able to exert. But the second realisation, just this once, was the exposed skin, and that was what made the light look different on Ronan.

With the cover spread from his waist down, the tank top that Ronan irreverently wore in lieu of all the other pieces that went under the uniform jacket clung to his back. He was very pale, and Adam knew that already — he would flush before Adam, when the heat of a too-prolonged sparring had burned through both of their bodies — but there was something odd about the skin of his back. 

Birthmarks, Adam guessed at first. Then, vision swaying at the edge of sleep, he was certain Ronan was heavily tattooed — Adam wouldn’t put it beyond him. 

He saw black for a bit, his eyes must have dropped closed, but a sudden thought flashed through his mind so clear Adam could almost picture it.

_Drifting scars._

His eyes flashed back open and he looked down again, in the penumbra, glancing at the span of Ronan’s back with new purpose. 

There were lines, dark and almost weirdly translucent in the blue hue. So dense they looked like a drawing, like a net cast over Ronan’s back — or like vines, twisting in a patch of wildness of the type Adam hadn’t seen since he’d left Virginia and never, ever looked back. There was a point right at the bent of Ronan’s jutting shoulder blades that was particularly heavy. Adam’s mind was surely playing tricks to him because for a delirious moment he thought it was like feathers, and it made perfect sense.

Worse still, the intrusive thought of turning on the light and staring at the entire design of it actually lulled him closer to fragmented dreams. 

Ronan would probably be contrary — as usual, always, constantly. But maybe they would spar for it, too, for Adam’s unjustified curiosity. 

The suggestion of being able to see _more_ made something twist deep within his stomach, with a little jump. 

He couldn’t open his eyes anymore, too heavy, so Adam’s mind twisted the shapes he had half glanced in the dark — knotting them, spreading them, curling over like a snake and fluttering like a bird’s wings. It morphed in kind of a dream, more like a visual pool.

Even in his sleep, Adam swallowed against the unexpected intensity of the discovery.

Ronan Lynch had a broad back full of deep drifting scars.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Any degree of close relationship with Colonel Richard Campbell Gansey III came sprinkled with a liberal amount of research. When it wasn’t research, it was politics. When it wasn’t politics, it was tactics and it looked way too much like research. Side projects like _Legendary Welsh Kings_ were usually labelled as recreational activity.

Henry had come to realise this pattern in his time at the Hong Kong Shatterdome, even more so in the last month when he didn’t have to shuttle back and forth between Blue and Gansey as the former refused to cross the latter. 

“You know, I really thought the Golden Boy status came with the privilege of lazing around and ordering minions to do stuff,” Blue considered, with three screens up and a tablet to take notes. 

Henry looked at her from above the edge of yet another pair of screens, combing through a frustrating database, “Arguably he _is_ ordering his minions to do stuff.”

“Jane!” A voice called over from behind two ceiling-high black boxes, full of severely rank-locked material that Gansey was using his authentication to cherry-pick. “I was thinking that maybe you should look into residual drifting synchronisation?”

Henry raised his eyebrows in the universal sign for _you see_ and Blue rolled her eyes with so much emphasis it was almost a full-body movement. Still, when she asked, she was hard-suffering but constructive, “Which is the naming convention for which years?” 

“Last five years I would believe? We’ve always colloquially called it _the tide_.” Gansey replied, still out of the field of vision. “Do try, if not it’s from early stages of development.”

“Just say you don’t know, holy shit,” Blue hissed, but still she swiped up for a new notebook page and went to comply.

What they also learned was that Gansey had a research method in his madness, one that would fish out information from wells in which Henry would have _sworn_ there were none.

Henry had barely gone through yet another eye-crossing section of tables with an horrifically small font that would not stand for reformatting when Gansey’s voice called over again. He seemed to have moved along the length of the racks.

“Henry!”

He sighed and Blue smiled wickedly, as if to say, _your turn now_. “Yes, dearest.”

“Can you…” There was a weird stuttering, interrupting the sentence. “Would you mind checking specifically for suppliers of non-linear quantum capacitors?”

“Sure,” Henry said, even though not even the extensive training of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps made him so confident about what the use of a quantum capacitors could be, let alone a non-linear one. “Are you okay over there?”

“Absolutely fine!” Gansey chirped up.

Which was of course a perfect reason to look at Blue with an unconvinced and interrogative frown because Gansey never lost his train of thought. Blue seemed perplexed as well. 

They had both experienced _Gansey’s train of thought_ , more intimately than any other human being apart his sister could ever understand. The intersecting net he seemed to cast over everything now, in the privacy of one of the many archives of the Research, Development, and Implementation department, grew into a chessboard in play for the World’s final checkmate. The drift had shown it to them — had dragged them in it.

On a Jaeger, while engaged, Gansey was a King, directing the pieces to fall in place for the final victory. It was almost terrifying to think that Glendower notoriously had Helen, and not him, as the head-pilot. 

Then, to Henry’s great confusion, Blue lit up as if she just had an amazing epiphany. She turned around on her chair, to face towards Gansey even though he was out of their field of vision.

“Are you getting _shy_ because Henry called you _dearest_?”

“Absolutely not!”

_Absolutely_ again. Henry found himself echoing Blue’s smirk. “Come out of there, _darling_ , we can talk about this!”

A couple of seconds of silence again. Blue was probably right and Gansey was flustered on nothing. “Just...give me five minutes, okay, I’m trying to decode this thing and it’s messy. And really, look into the capacitors.”

Henry sighed again, echoed by Blue. “I will, I will.”

Leaning over from the other desk, Blue whispered, conspiratorial. “Let’s go get him in three, I’m sure he’ll feel better if you suck him off.”

Henry laughed, and the laughter only became more open when Gansey protested — “I’ll know it if you talk behind my back!” 

Blue’s proposition won several points over, because everything would be surely better.

Evnetually, though, they didn’t get to corner Gansey somewhere in the brightly lit up and not completely private room. The doors opened with a bip and Helen Gansey entered with Declan Lynch in tow.

The former was a common enough occurrence, the latter came with an unpinnable personality, all-powerful researcher behaviour and a face that brought a stark resemblance with his younger brother. 

Moreover, it was clear for all of them that Declan Lynch was not to be involved in Operation Drift-Ghost. 

Put on the spot, Henry and Blue did the only natural thing you do after spending years in a military organisation and faced with inconvenient superiors, and stood up. 

“Good afternoon…” they both said, just to charge up. Then Blue turned around. “Gansey, Helen is here...and Dr Lynch too.”

There was no stress or outright tension in her word, and Gansey slid out quick, all too natural, appearing in the main room. 

“Oh, hi!” Gansey said, walking forward to meet them at the door. “You caught us in the middle of an afternoon research session.”

“You mean you dragged them in one of your madness moments,” Helen countered, but still kissed him on both cheeks. The two of them still slid together without having to beckon each other or give additional indications — the most familiar of all families. 

“No, _absolutely_ ,” Henry stressed over the word, enjoying how it made Gansey’s ears go lightly pink at the top. “We would have never left him unsupervised.”

“Or we would never recover him,” Blue completed for him.

Helen looked at the three of them with a smile that had a different twist from her polished composure — a little sad, a little contemplative. She had seemed on the verge of saying something but this was evidently an afternoon for _distracted Ganseys_.

“I hope you’re aware that you could call one of the members of my team with a task and have them scour the databases for you,” Declan pointed out. As his little brother, he had the tendency to speak more with Gansey, or with the two Ganseys in this case, than the rest of them. But rather than not acknowledging their existence unless forced, it was more like Declan didn’t have an idea of what to made of them.

Henry wasn’t aware, actually, that he could direct random people he didn’t know to perform tedious jobs on his behalf. For Gansey, though, it rolled perfectly normal.

“I know, I know, you’ve always been very lenient with us. Thank you, Declan.” They must be reasonable acquainted but not exceedingly _close_ , considering the way Gansey was talking to him. “We were just playing with the evolutions of the drift research through the years, it’s a bit...pilot specific, I would say, or Raven King specific, so we’re handling it.”

Unaware of the little flip that Henry’s stomach had — in hearing Gansey confessing, but not quite — Declan just lifted an eyebrow. “I’ve been dying on the drift research and you know it fully well, but if you find anything interesting in just the archive please do come sharing.”

Declan eyed the computers while saying it and of course Gansey would tell him some sort of truth-adjacent thing — there was no real lying allowed. It was obvious, outside of Henry’s sudden spike of semi-unjustified panic. 

“What are you doing about drift research?” Blue, who never knew anxiety in her all life probably, just asked.

“Ironically enough, considering that I’m the one that keeps you all operative, the basics,” Declan said, with a little snarl that really resembled Ronan and seemed an after-effect of exasperation.

Helen peeked over Henry’s shoulder, to glance at the database. “Declan is working on the private drivers left over from Artemus…”

“...and on your arm.” Gansey added.

“And on my arm.” 

It looked more responsive, actually, but still not as adroit as non-prosthetic one. 

“Frankly we’re almost lucky they’re so encrypted.” Declan huffed, walking further into the room as well.

“Are we? I thought it drove everyone crazy while Raven King was getting set up from the merge,” Gansey said, eyeing him carefully.

Helen huffed a strand of hair out of her face and lifted up, “That’s because the U.N. are being a pain in the ass...whoops...I meant they are being _commendable and thorough in their supervision._ ”

The change in tone and in wording would have been more hilarious if a glint in Helen’s eyes didn’t seem to suggest she was absolutely _livid_. Gansey must have caught it way before Henry — who just benefitted from leeching off the drift for human knowledge — and was back in front of her quickly.

“What happened?”

“Remote meeting number 310129, give or take,” Helen said, and even through the hyperbole it was clear that this was a recurrent discussion between the brothers. It wasn’t difficult to believe she was _politicking_ around — the uniform she donned was spotless, not exactly day to day, still fully made-up. “I actually came around to tell you that we need to start to organise your fourth mission. And we will go out of the quadrants, this time”

At this, all three of them blinked. 

So far, their outings with Raven King had been limited to an area that covered the whole sea from Hong Kong to the Philippines and brushed the costs of Taiwan. It was active, full of spawns, but it was also manageable. Out of a quadrant meant more variability, less backup of weapons and support from the Headquarter. It had never been a problem, back in the days of full operations with Fox and Glendower relying on Greywaren to pull up equipment with Dreamcatcher, but it was a problem _now_.

“Out of the quadrants where? I don’t remember any report of alarming activity,” Gansey pointed out, with a frown, stealing Blue’s tablet and closing the notes to open up another system. 

“That’s because there’s nothing out of the usual, but you’re still going to clean around Okinawa.” Helen sighed, leaning against one of the desks, evidently suffering of having ran the same argument before Gansey could present it to her. “Apparently we have to show off more, apparently the Japanese government is putting pressure to see finalised results closer to critical zones and they’re claiming priority. All of this _apparently_ could just be that the thrice-damned Colin Greenmantle is gaining momentum in the U.N.”

“Who is this dude?” Blue rolled slightly backwards on her wheeled chair, to have a better look at them. 

“Vice-secretary of the United Nation special agency dedicated to Word Crisis and Threat Management. Basically the global Kaiju alert, and we might as well call him the ‘shadow’ secretary because everyone knows he runs the show.” Declan’s tone had marked annoyance hiding behind the half-didactic approach. 

“What happens if we don’t go?” Henry asked, refusing to withdraw the question even though it won him two penetrating stares from both Declan and Helen. 

“It happens that I need to manage this thing somehow, and I can’t stall the threat of them requisitioning Greywaren if we don’t give something else. The best way to keep most of our cards in a hand is that you prove them the Corps can still annihilate them.” Helen shoot off, calm but sort of glacial, straightening up. “Everything clear?”

Considering the arrangement, it had to be, or they will get dismantled one after the other. They didn’t even have to look at each other before replying in one voice.

“Clear.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


The harbour of the Hong Kong Shatterdome was a monumental affair shooting off the island, and yet it wasn’t big enough to contain that hybrid monstrosity between a cargo ship and an aircraft carrier that could cover big distances while loaded with a Jaeger. They would depart in fifteen minutes, 03:00 in the night, and the sea that awaited them was pitch black and still like dark velvet.

The contrast was even more stark in the too bright headlights that shone on the pier, illuminating it in an artificial daylight threatened by the night beyond its fringes.

Blue stood at Gansey’s right side, while Henry covered his left, in an arrangement that was now becoming usual. They already had the piloting suit on, adhering viciously to their bodies in a way that didn’t leave space to feel cold.

“This is really a pile of shit and I don’t like this,” Ronan was saying, a subtle shiver that could be anger as well as the sweeping breeze from the sea.

“I know, Ronan, but we’re gonna make them swallow the haughtiness.” Gansey was uncharacteristically vicious, and Blue knew it was coming from what was at stake. 

She eyed Ronan carefully, in his forbidding and unwelcoming self, and she had to admit to herself that she knew more, now — more than the fact that his father died with him on the drift, and that alone should justify a whole lot. She knew he had grew up with Gansey and they would never let go of each other, but she also knew that he would always come and see them off for a mission. She knew he was an asshole, but she also knew he would never miss the tactical meetings, even though he was not going to deploy. 

He didn’t deserve to get everything stripped by politicians.

“Yeah, sure,” Ronan grumbled. “I’m gonna stand on idle with Greywaren.”

Blue glanced over Henry but they both avoided searching for Gansey’s gaze. Still, when Gansey replied, it was in line with what they both were thinking.

“This is hardly necessary, it’s annoying that they’re jumping out schedule but the Pacific Rim is still closed.” 

“We were the last ones to go outside of the quadrant.” Ronan snarled, eyes maniac in the excessive light. “So _fuck you_ , I’m standing on idle.”

The counterpart of this _we_ never came back from outside the quadrant, but it was still a we. It was weird to consider, for the first time, what it meant to be in the high-ranks — the first and in this case also _the last_ line of defence for the world. Would Blue herself keep saying _we_ even if Gansey and Henry were to be stripped away from her? Blue swallowed hard against the thought.

“Okay,” Gansey was saying, in a slow whisper. “Okay, thank you.” 

“Fuck off,” Ronan reiterated, but he still let Gansey hug him when he walked closer, plastering the two of them together.

For all the show of biting words and malevolent expression, when Ronan held Gansey close it was with a hand against the fixture of the piloting suit that traced along Gansey’s spine. Gansey would feel it all the way up his face, and Blue knew it, because her suit was just the same, now — matching.

“Go and clean some garbage.” Ronan let Gansey go just as firmly and abruptly as he had held him. “And you two don’t leave him floating in the ocean by himself.”

“Mmhn, it can be fairly tempting but I’m sure we’ll manage,” Blue joked, failing to defuse the tension even just for herself.

“Yeah, he does have his perks,” Henry echoed. 

“I really don’t want to know,” Ronan said, turning around and walking away — back towards his car rather than the general vehicles — without any further goodbye.

They walked their way through the cargo ship, towards the Jaeger. It was a shared decision that they will spend even the commuting time in active drifting — ready-steady — even though it was going to be hours. Maybe that said more about how they could all feel the same nervousness, rather than just Ronan being paranoid and scarred.

“Are they actually screening candidates to put Greywaren back into active duty?” Henry asked, keeping Gansey’s left even through the corridors.

“Of course they are, but...I mean, you met Ronan,” Gansey admitted, pinching at the bridge of his nose, even though the gesture was weird with all the hand fixtures for piloting already on. “And you haven’t quite met Greywaren. I know we all say it’s one of a kind but honestly no one but Ronan and his father actually achieved reasonable drifting stats for it. But you know, Niall championed the program, half the system of the Jaeger comes from his mind, the other half is Artemus. I can totally believe they tailored that crazy Jaeger to their wishes.”

Artemus kept popping up in every technical conversation, but from what Blue had gathered the previous head of the Research, Development and Implementation was dead. She wanted to ask about it — for good measure of clearing up the knowledge gaps and kickstarting a topic of conversation for the journey — but a figure turned a corner and Adam was marching towards them.

“Hey,” Blue greeted him first but the echo of the others came quickly. “What are you doing here, I thought you already had a full shift when we met after dinner?”

“Yeah, I asked Boyd,” Adam shrugged, dismissively, in full work attire and single-handedly carrying packs of instruments that would suffice an entire team. “I did the last checkings, just in case, and made sure that your anchoring and the launching system of the cargo are fully functional. You’re really all set.”

Behind the aseptic technical tone, the reality was that Adam must have given up sleep, for this. 

“Adam…” Blue murmured, touched in more way she could describe — and weirded out, intrinsically, by this rapidly widening world in which she could assume more people would move for her than just Henry.

“It’s okay,” Adam settled the matter before it could even start, not brusque but possibly embarrassed? It was difficult to discern, with his constant half-frown as if everything required some degree of concentration. “Take it as an incentive to don’t bring me back that Jaeger in shambles, I worked too much on it.”

“Well, we’ll sure try our best to be considerate,” Gansey replied, laughing. When he raised a first towards him, Adam just looked confused for a second.

“Bump it. Apparently we roll like it’s the early 2000s,” Henry joked. 

“Ah!” Adam seemed to realise, and the skepticism morphed into a genuine surprise, as if he wasn’t certain of what to do with this sudden familiarity. Still, he bumped his knuckles against Gansey’s — and then Blue’s, and Henry’s too, when they followed suit — and it was nice to see that somehow they had touched him back. 

“Goodnight, Adam,” Blue told him, patting him off for good measure. “Go to sleep.”

And just like that, they were left with the technical staff allowed on board of the cargo and with Raven King. Then, once they found their way inside the hangar, it was just the three of them.

The commanding bridge was online but her mother and Calla merely checked the vitals and the connection rather than engaging into a big conversation.

“It’s going to be difficult to sleep on a drift,” Maura warned them, a slight hint of disapproval in her voice, but she still let them be when they refused to cave. 

Still, unsurprisingly, she was right — not only because sitting in the hutch with the full system connected wasn’t comfortable, but also because the drift was _buzzing_. 

However, there was comfort in feeling Henry and Gansey this close — close enough to be loved in full. She followed the curve of their thoughts and their worries, of unrelated memories and random connections that they were more than ready to discuss, even while only pronouncing a word over five out loud. 

It was different, outside the battle, more akin to a deeper version of a slow morning together. Drifting felt close, when she could use Henry’s bare shoulder as a pillow and face Gansey on the other side, their hands meeting in the middle. It would be good, to have another moment like that, after.

“With another bed, even better,” Henry added, following the train of thought.

They rarely had a bed that wasn’t supplied by a Shatterdome, honestly. For their eighteenth birthday, though, with the strength of their combined savings, Blue and Henry had gone up the Yosemite. It was an unique place, high enough and away from the cost to have not been razed by the destruction of the Kaijus — even more so when the Shatterdomes clustered in the deep East and the monster from the Rim seemed to follow. They had camped there, and the inflatable mattress in a tent just for their own — with full natural lighting and no sounds of a military base in constant operation — had felt like luxury. 

“We should do it again,” Blue said, feeling the memory flow between them, more images and sensations than actual narrative.

“Will you bring me, as well?” Gansey asked, out loud, as if the little flutter of his heart — his begging for acceptance while not knowing what to do with the possibility of rejection — didn’t flow through them, bittersweet and endearing.

“No, you will bring _us_ ,” Henry replied. “To find your King.”

Blue closed her eyes against the recollection that streamed through — Gansey’s painstaking knowledge too deep to be even grazed without a dissecting approach to this drifting, Henry’s warm memory of Gansey telling him a story like a crazy researcher he was. She would never have them close enough — but this was as close as they could get.

The hours passed easy, safe and fully accepted — _known_ without having to dissect every fiber of her being — in the dark blue of the hutch while on idle.

They deployed at dawn.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Raven King was freed from its anchorage very close to the Miyakojima Isle, already in the Okinawa Prefecture. Sky and sea around them shared the same bright orange of the rising sun, glittering in what promised to be a clear day.

Avoiding flipping the cargo was a delicate manoeuvre and get nothing Gansey didn't have extensive experience with. They grabbed onto one of the rocks, the Jaeger's arm reaching and bent at the elbow to provide leverage. Then they flipped off, landing on their feet on the island. The ship that brought them all the way here only rocked a little with the residual momentum, and they saluted it as it reversed its course. 

It wasn't considered safe — never was, never will be — to purposefully be in proximity of a Jaeger in operation. They will be recovered after the mission, and Raven King had a specific air-tight vault with supplies for a delay of up to 48 hours.

Back in the days before the great war with the Kaijus, two days in Okinawa would have been a reward. But the Prefecture was too exposed to the Pacific, and easy ground of damage even without being the direct target. It had been fully evacuated since 2019, and even from the distance the combined devastation of five years abandonment and raids scarred the landscape.

“That's not how I remember it from pictures on the internet,” Henry admitted, with a low sigh, as they walked.

“It'll recover. It will be a nice world, once we finish cleaning up,” Gansey said, looking straight ahead even while being deeply aware — mind and body — of Blue and Henry angled in their gears just slightly above him.

“Give or take ten years at least, then,” Blue considered. It was a long time for her, Gansey could sense it.

He shrugged, and shied away from his own weighing of _what are ten years_. “That's not long, in peace.”

“Pin it to the diary then, we can come back when it's settled,” Henry said, cheerfully.

At this, Gansey ended up looking back at him, just a glance before he could help himself — just a surge of emotion though the drift before he could stir it under control. The purpose of words was defied.

Henry grinned at him. “Eyes up front, soldier, you're not getting any of this while here.”

Gansey snickered, “Oh no, do I have to wait?”

The display came alive with the transmission from the commanding bridge and Maura's voice cut through the chattering.

“Raven King, do you copy?”

“We copy,” Gansey confirmed, back into business. He glanced at the dialogue windows that covered the visual screen of the piloting hutch — a 180° panoramic view of Miyakojima peppered with tables, graphs and status bars in half transparency. He let Blue's awareness over the weapons wash over him, paired with Henry keeping check of the internal status wash over him before confirming. “All systems active, nothing to report. And I mean nothing, we see no strong signature for Kaiju-related matter.”

“The satellites are calibrated for wider coverage, I can't give you a minute report,” Calla told them. Their faces were in focus in small squares, when they activated the microphone. “Stick to Tarama Island, the last report from yesterday suggests aggressive egg nests.”

“Wow, constant delight,” Blue commented. She and Henry had cleaned off way too many even with just their not-personalised prototype back in Los Angeles.

“Roger.” Gansey confirmed, while Henry reset their movement to bring them to the next island over through the shallow patches of water — or at least, shallow for a Jaeger.

Gansey disliked piloting in water. It was difficult to distinguish if he had always disliked it or it was a post Doomsday occurrence. But he sighed deeply and let Blue and Henry anchor him until they touched ground again.

“Tadan,” Blue proclaimed. 

The two of them were weird in an unique way, to drift with. Blue malleable to any quirk to the point they could never throw her off track. Henry anxious like a live wire but in a carefree way that beckoned attention and focus. Gansey wasn't better _per se_ — but he was better with them.

“And here is our welcome committee, let's go reach them.” Henry's attention shift through the drift was akin to gesturing.

One of the cliffs was covered in unnaturally purple rocks, shiny and weirdly pulsing. Not rocks, then, but an aggressive bunch of eggs.

“Target locked,” Gansey notified the headquarter. In unison, they shifted on their platforms and weighed down, hard. “Engaging in three…”

They sprinted. The phantom sensation of wind in their faces and ground shaking under their feet ricocheted from the Jaeger through the neural connection.

“...Two…”

With a clack from her handles, Blue flipped Raven King left arm to engage the flame thrower. 

“...One…”

Henry's frame clacked as he charged up the energy, calibrating through the interface.

And then, there was Gansey, leading the targeting and the final trajectory of engage.

“Boom.”

They shoot right through the gooey strips that were unfolding and lifting aggressively, reaching right back at Raven King as the threat it was. 

The weaponised nest caught fire in the centre and still lifted to try and envelop them as they kept charging through the fire.

Blue equipped the electrically charged baton and they physically fought their way to ripping this semi-sentient monstrosity to shreds, the fire slowly dying around them.

There was something weird in the background, like the static from the thunder, even though Blue should have not overcharged the batons to that point and the nest didn't appear inherently charged in itself.

The point with nests was always finding the warm core that heated up the eggs. It would be an easier task with an infrared standard mapping if the nests itself wasn’t shielding the spot, and moving it around in gooey, freezing membranes. 

It was messy in a wild way — ripping and clawing and cutting and burning, all while the nest tried to close back on them. The hits could be surprisingly hard.

“ _You_ ’re the damaging invader, you thrice damned bastard,” Gansey hissed, and guided the blades out of Raven King’s calves to cut through backwards.

“He’s pretty sexy when he’s murderous,” Blue commented, and through the drift Gansey could sense it was only for Henry to reply. A wholehearted assent came from him too, accompanied by a flash of Gansey himself, gritting his teeth and sweaty — but in two very different situations.

“I’m still here,” Gansey mumbled out, trying not to blush but failing not to _yearn_ with the adrenaline pumping.

“Oh we know, we feel you loud and clear,” Henry countered, very self-satisfied.

“You two are so distracting.” He tossed a fragmentation grenade in, fully aware that his own complaints lacked depth.

At the end, it finished as violently as it started, an explosion of incandescent liquid and a gas toxic enough to darken the earth around them. 

Henry, who had the aim of an old school SWATT sniper, had taken the shot for the team in the exact second they exposed just a fraction of the core.

Gansey still had a weird feeling like static electricity — and it was difficult, so entrenched, to distinguish it if came from he as himself, or one of the others, or the outer shell of the Jaeger. 

“The nest is destroyed,” Gansey reported for the commanding bridge, which had been pretty silent — rightfully so, Gansey had killed much worse in his career. “Requesting permission to annihilate the totality of the eggs, rough estimate is twenty, I believe it’s a type 23-Z-K from the…”

A stuttering sequence of unintelligible sentences filtered through a high whistle, like the interference of a microphone with electronics. It brought Gansey’s assessment to a brutal stop.

“HQ, copy?” Gansey demanded, activating the video feed for good measure.

Or trying to. 

It came up frozen on the same image of Maura and Calla that they had caught before engaging. Trembling and breaking up in lines. 

Another ear-splitting whistles through the loudspeakers, and then there was silence.

No audio channel and no video interface.

Just like that, they had lost comms.

There was something like ice, settling deep in all three of their stomachs. 

And then the air broke like a crack of thunder — just like Greywaren. The hill the nest had latched onto crumbled in a million pieces of dirt, dust and gorey remain.

The analytics of Raven King blared alive, howling for threats in every possible direction.

A second before, there were none — a second after, they were surrounded. 

A plethora of objects cannonballed onto them, in the front, to the side, from behind.

Blue tossed the fragmentation grenade they had been preparing for the eggs and it almost didn’t do any damage. The flash from it lit up the incoming objects, blobs of metal and disturbingly organic matter, ill-matched, like wasps but not quite, drones but not quite.

And they were coming and coming and coming.

They were under attack.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Ronan had nightmares like this, but his nightmares were never so bright.

They were red, sometimes, and flickering, alarms blaring inside of a hutch that dripped blood and slowly crunched down, killing everyone Ronan has ever loved in its path. And Ronan would wake, always, before it could take him too. Like a coward.

But now everything was bright, as bright as the Operation Hall and the hangar, pouring light into the Greywaren through the front window of its pilot hutch.

Aseptic and linear, all his perceptions of this _maybe-reality_ were full of details his dreams usually didn’t care about — the twinge in his knees from standing still in the harness for too long, that subtle line of ache that ran through his forehead from lack of sleep, that low-level static that came from being connected to the drifting line without having anyone to drift with.

It had started normally, as every mission starts. Then, as every nightmare does, it slipped precipitously downwards.

First, it was the lack of real Kaiju’s signatures in everything but Tarama Island. Then, it was the anomalies, the control towers interfacing with the satellite getting incongruent readings. 

When they tried to warn Raven King, evidently engaged with a weaponised nest, there was an uncharacteristic lack of acknowledgements from the team — which would have marked the only time in Gansey’s service in which he didn’t follow a spotless protocol.

A shiver ran cold with terror down Ronan’s spine. 

There had been a time, when Ronan was much younger, when he had harboured the illusion that everything was going to be all right. And fast. Any minute now, while the world crumbled towards apocalypse, one monster at the time. Then the monsters kept coming, and Ronan had stopped expecting them not to. 

But at least, then, he would fight them.

Here, clutching at the handles of an unresponsive Jaeger who echoed empty like a shell with no substance, Ronan could only pray to the God his father had shared with him.

_Not again, not again, not again._

The whole Operation Hall was listening to Raven King through the loudspeakers. 

There was a crackle, like discharged electricity. Then a faint, itched whistle.

Ronan’s breath caught hard enough that he was sure his ribs would snap. 

“Raven King, do you copy?” Maura’s voice reverberated all the way to the Greywaren, tense. Then once more, with an undertone that felt remarkably like fear. “Do you copy?”

Silence.

There was no mercy from their own reporting system, when the writing appeared — on the commanding bridge screens, the Hall screens, Ronan’s own screens.

_Contact lost._

Ronan jerked in the harness as if to fight against it — or fight with anything else. Blood rushed through his temples and his eardrums, pulsing erratically. He felt sick, _oh so sick_ , and the clamor in his brain covered up whatever conversation was going on in the bridge.

“Pilot input.” His voice was alien in the hutch, shaking. “Set mode to active, ready-steady.”

Primed to Ronan’s biosignature and voice-recognition, the whole Jaeger lit up in a low blue hue, initialising the same protocol Ronan had ran through day in and day out for five years of war. He knew the steps, he knew what was coming, he knew what he _wanted_.

“ _Initialising neural connection_ ,” the familiar disembodied voice of Greywaren notified him.

It was a split second, stretching impossibly long. Like jumping off a high cliff and turning around for the dive, a body-wide angling for it through thin air. The anxious flutter in his chest was familiar as well. But this time, it was like touching asphalt instead of water, crashing back against Ronan while Ronan tried to get in. 

The dark blue flashed red while Ronan’s eyes crossed in the recoil.

“ _Drift unstable. Neural handshake unbalanced_.”

“Ronan, what in the _fucking hell_ do you think you’re doing?” Declan’s voice barked through the comms, all the way from the commanding bridge. 

It was difficult to breathe and yet he tried. Beside him, what used to be Niall’s spot — head Pilot of the couple, leader of their drift — was devoid of more than his father’s physical presence. 

“I’m going to get them.” He stuttered. It sounded good, it was what he wanted, it was the only chance. “I’m going to _get them_.”

“You _can’t_ get them!” Declan had no business sounding this scared, as if he didn’t know what could happen to the team of Raven King out of the quadrant, like this.

“Initialise,” Ronan ordered, clenching his teeth.

He did it once, he could do it again — he just had to be ready. Ready-steady, like a Jaeger.

But no focus helped him through the hit, through his brain stretching hard and trying to shoulder, utterly alone, the drift potential of a machine calibrated to be one of a kind, one deemed difficult even for two pilots to manage.

He screamed, and he could feel the attempted drift shattering again.

More alarms. “ _Drift unstable. Neural handshake unbalanced._ ”

“Fuck you!” Ronan recoiled, cursing his own Jaeger for the first time in his life. “And fuck you too, _Noah_ , wherever you are!”

It was irrational and unfounded, and even saying it brought tears to Ronan’s eyes. If he could only have a little _help_ — but Greywaren was not even coming online, for him alone. 

“Ronan, you have to stop this.” Even Calla argued, supporting Declan’s protests. “We’re gonna send someone for them, but you have to stop attempting a drift…”

“You’re not gonna make it!” Ronan yelled furiously at her, at them, at everyone who would listen. “They’re too far away and you’re not gonna make it!” 

The wave of nausea grappling at his stomach was in equal part a result of two failed drifting attempts and of the panic of being so close to losing Gansey and his team. Because they were going to die. Ronan knew they were going to die.

He wanted to try again but he couldn’t, too trained not to instinctively understand that he was going to faint if he did — and if he were to faint, they would drag him out of Greywaren, cursed to wait for the corpses. 

He breathed in, hard, and ignored Declan arguing through the comms, focusing on letting the nausea retreat and staring into nothingness. 

On the other side of the screen, the whole Hall was looking inside the hangar, back at Ronan, witnessing his failure. Having set the active mode, each and every one of them was sharing this conversation. They must be all aware that this could very much be the downfall of the whole Pan Pacific Defence Corps, from an unknown enemy that acted in mysterious and deadly ways. And yet none of them was doing anything about it.

Did they even understood, that Ronan just needed a little help?

Blood was still boiling in his veins and it was difficult to think of anything that was not terror. 

“Ronan, you know you can’t do this alone, it’s not how it works.” Declan insisted, insufferable and at the same time almost genuinely worried.

His brother was right and Ronan didn’t know what to do with this fact, with how _alone_ that left Ronan. He closed his eyes and it didn’t help either.

Declan was right, he was right.

“Adam Parrish.” It came out with a shout and only a second later Ronan realised that it had been _his own_. Two seconds of helpless silence and his heart thumped in his chest. “Adam Parrish, come on board.”

Declan swore through the comms, past the point of exasperation. “No one is coming on board, are you out of your _fucking mind_?” 

The answer was, in all honesty, _probably_. 

“I’m calling Adam Parrish on board. Lieutenant General Lynch’s suit is still in the preparation room and Parrish’s coming on board. With it. _Now_.”

“Colonel, this is unprecedented and markedly out of protocol.” It was General Astrid Gansey, this time, but even her voice had clear signs of tension.

“I’m evoking pilot rights in situation of critical compromise. And as the only active pilot on base, I’m clearing Adam Parrish for operation and _recovering your fucking son_.” Ronan didn’t want his voice to shake but it did, even as it ramped up, and up, growing of surety that this was _his right_. “Parrish, get your _ass_ over here!”

He couldn’t see him all the way through the hall. Adam could be anywhere.

But Adam will come. He will come, to Ronan.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“I’m clearing Adam Parrish for operation and _recovering your fucking son_.”

Adam stood in the middle of the Hall and the floor almost swayed under his feet. It was both surreal and overwhelmingly substantial.

One after another, the eyes of the Tech team turned to him and Adam felt them on his skin, on his back, all around him, requiring him to acknowledge the fact that his name had just boomed, over and over, directly from Greywaren.

In an all-too-usual gesture, Adam looked up, over the Hall, towards the commanding bridge. Discussions were evidently flaring up, but the comms were muted and Adam could only imagine the outrage — not hear it.

Numbly, he lifted his tablet, scrolling down with two fingers to bring up his personal profile. Picture, name, Tech rank, all the clearances he had collected through the years to work hands-on with the Jaegers if he could not work _on_ the Jaegers.

This was not going to happen.

And then, through the rising hums of all the teams gathered in the Hall, an inconspicuous dialogue box popped up, lengthening his personal specifications. 

_“Piloting hutch of Jaeger Mark-III-1, code-name Greywaren: status - CLEARED.”_

Adam blinked at it with ringing ears, detached from his own surroundings. 

“Parrish.” Boyd’s voice snapped him back into reality and Adam blinked at him, as well. “You’ve been called and critical emergency is confirmed. You know where to go?”

Of course he knew. Everyone knew and Adam in particular had daydreamed his whole life of being allowed into the pilots preparation rooms.

He couldn’t do this. There was no way he could do this.

_Adam Parrish_ , Ronan Lynch had screamed through the whole Shatterdome, uncaring of any law beside his own. _Parrish_.

Adam dropped his tablet in Boyd’s hands, and started to run.

The preparation rooms connected the Hall with the higher bridge of the launching hutch. Passing through it, one was expected to come out ready for boarding and nothing else. The most Adam knew of it were the triple sliding doors, a forbidding layer of black with the sigil of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps etched in white on both sides.

He ran towards it, dropping pieces of his uniform in his path. Purposefully ignoring the anxiety that glued his tongue on the roof of his mouth.

_They're gonna stay close_ , a treacherous part of his brain whispered, even as every signalling light in the Shatterdome flashed red intermittently in recognition that a pilot had evoked critical status. _I'll get stuck outside._

One step, the doors were glued shut. The next, Adam's dog tags were at less than 1.5 meters radius.

The doors opened.

When Adam halted to an uncertain stop, he was inside.

His immobility wasn't echoed by the room, which was in a vortex of automated movements.

It looked like one of the white rooms of the Research, Development and Implementation department, all pristine and too luminous, with pods full of piloting suits to the left and right. At half a glance, they were all divided by Jaeger and pilot.

At the other side, the exit doors were equally black and still glued shut. And midway through, a cylinder of metal and Plexiglas stood open.

Adam didn't know what to do but dropping the rest of his clothes and shoes, standing naked in the heavy aircon. It was something pilots did, getting naked on the run in an emergency — but what next?

His cluelessness did not matter. 

The floor itself started to move, while one of the suits detached from the pods labelled as _Mark-III-1_. It looked more like a shapeless blob of shimmery fabric full of fixtures, but it shoot through in the cylinder just as Adam was projected forward.

It was a graceless exercise, stumbling into the setup rather than sliding in it or something. But the floor itself rearranged to make his naked feet fall in position, and in a blind instinct Adam rushed to reach forward, hands thrusting into the gloves that lingered beside him.

There was a _ting_ in the air, and then everything was impossibly fast, like a vacuum pump set at full speed.

The cylinder closed on him, and all the fixtures flew on his body at the same time, latching onto Adam. Then everything tightened, the shimmery fabric adhering at his body like a wetsuit. 

It prickled, not quite a hurt but very invasive. Around his knuckles, on his wrists, on his elbows and ankles. And then all the way through his back, on his sternum, on his legs. When it snapped on his nape, Adam gasped and tensed, half sure it had pierced the skin. 

He didn't have time to catalogue it. It was two seconds. Then there were plates pressing on his temples and the cylinder was ejecting him out.

Adam rushed through the doors.

The bridge was impossibly high and it interrupted abruptly into nothingness. Right on top of Greywaren.

Faced with immensity of a Jaeger at a different height than he had ever faced before, a part of Adam’s mind screamed that this was _madness_. There was a reason he was not a pilot, a reason the first line of fight was not his. This reason came with dark corners and excruciating pain, it came with the knowledge that this was as much about integrity as it was about ability — and Adam might have the ability, but his mind was _ruined_.

_I’m going to get them_ , Ronan had screamed. Raven King, with Blue and Henry and Gansey, who had not know what was up with Adam but kept him around anyway. Raven King, that Adam checked in the night exactly because he wanted to take no chances.

This was a whole universe of chances — but what other _choice_ was there?

Adam couldn't breathe but he remembered to _run_ , his own body foreign to him in the suit.

At the edge of the bridge he was once again helpless, and with no one to ask to.

And yet answers kept coming by themselves.

There was a point between the Greywaren's back that was scaling open. The only point in and out of the impenetrable pilot hutch.

Stepping inside it was different than seeing it broadcasted from the Hall. It was bigger than it looked, dark at the corner in a deep blue hue not corrected by the cameras. The two piloting harness dominated the environment, the landing point of all the cables, all the output, all the inputs.

Adam could name each and every one of the elements and their role, and yet it didn't help him.

Ronan Lynch was just there, twisting around in the harness to look him from above. His face was a tense mask of barely disguised terror, and at least Adam was evidently not the only one in this hutch ready to throw up.

“You're here.” It sounded like a mishap, something heartfelt that came out of Ronan’s mouth unchecked in its relief. “You're late, get it, _now_.”

Scrambling to find his way through the harness, Adam got in. The hutch closed off with the low whistle of several vacuumised fixtures locking, shielded them in any way from the outside.

Finding the stepping frame was almost intuitive, as it were the handles. Adam felt the Jaeger automatically locking him in position at the soles of his feet and on each of his fingers, digging further in all the places where the suit had already attached itself rather aggressively.

Intellectually, Adam knew this was a process of optimisation of the neural connection for the pilots, ensuring a capillary control. But that didn't help him _practically_.

“I don't know what to do,” he confessed, in a stutter. 

Ronan was looking at him almost glazed, and through the near panic Adam was aware of standing in what had been Niall Lynch’s spot, glued in one of Niall Lynch's suit — but not the one the Lieutenant General had died in.

“Lynch!” He prompted, refusing to focus on the background noises from the commanding bridge — that Ronan must have forcibly tuned down as he waited _for Adam_. “Lynch, I don't know what to do.”

That seemed to snap Ronan back into a vitriolic attention. “Buckle up, we're calibrating for drifting. Execute.” 

The second part was evidently not for Adam. Greywaren came alive at the suggestion, though, the harness reshuffling at the right height and width to settle Adam in it. And then the cables lashed out, zeroing on the fixtures of the suit to connect the whole setup to the drifting line.

It burned.

“Ronan.” Declan Lynch's face came forcibly into focus on the screen, a close up in a square while the Hall occupied the whole background. “We already deployed the fastest support teams. You evoking a critical doesn't cancel out that this is a crazy idea.”

_This_ clearly meant _drifting with an untested subject with a horrible track record_.

It was difficult not to agree, even in a pool of adrenaline sourced by both terror and excitement like the one that enveloped Adam at the moment.

“We're going to Gansey...to Raven King. That's what we're doing,” Ronan reinstated, looking at Adam as if the plan wasn't abundantly clear — and still lacking in its logistics. “Are you gonna drift with me?”

That was...surprising. Backwards. Coming with the same tone Ronan had used, over and over, to ask if they could spar.

Disconcertingly, it also meant Adam could say _no_. Even so far out, even in the hutch, even with no backup plan.

The sheer possibility of it made Adam's teeth clatter out of his control. Ronan, beside him, was one impossible creature made of fury and grief.

“Bring it on,” Adam whispered.

A wide grin, all nerves, “I'm gonna fucking hit it.” And then Ronan said, “ _Initialise_.”

The whole hutch lit up with the front window. All the points of contact that had ached in preparation tightened even more. Adam felt them hard enough on his temples and on his spine that it made him whimper. 

Everything disappeared from the screen, aggressively dominated by two graphs. An impression of their separate neural curves, moving to merge.

A fraction of the second was all Adam got. And then the drift came like an avalanche.

It hurt. It split his brain in two, and then radiated from that single crack — a lighting striking in a purple sky.

Then it was past the point of pain, a body-wide shudder — like tumbling down the stairs and finding that you missed a final, tall step. The notion of falling that came before the falling.

After, there was nothing, or rather nothing present was relevant enough.

 

****

 

_Hits with objects are to be avoided, more than kicks. Kicks hurt more than punches. Punches hurt more then slaps._

_And yet there is something about slaps — the way the burn radiates superficially, the way you can get five in a row before you even breathe in once. It makes it difficult not to cry._

_Father discovered that quickly, and exercised that power viciously._

_Not that the list doesn't have its merit, regardless._

_The list is a mantra of warnings dripping over the stained walls of the trailer, the list has to be remembered especially when it’s the hardest thing to do._

_The list came before any other nicely-formed memory, in an indistinct blob of spite and spoonfed disgust as a response for every hunger._

_Forgetting the list has consequences. And if you thought slaps make you cry, wait for what comes after the snap of your bones._

****

_Any attention not carefully held will be lost. The more attention you lose, the more difficult it is to recover it._

_Your brother can be used as an example of this concept, which is both an advantage and a problem — If you would like his attention too, that is, and your brother is spiteful because you already got Father's._

_But Father is the most interesting person in the world, so it’s not difficult to embrace the things he loves — and become one of the things he loves in turn._

_It’s just easier, when these things are cars, music, impossible games. Impossible everything. You’re good at impossible, you see the thrill in it and Father sees the thrill of having you around._

_But then the monsters come from the sea. As the whole world runs away from them, you leave the farm, the hills, the cows and the ever-changing skies and follow Father, who wants to chase them. All the family does, and it’s not a real family anymore, after._

_The monsters are terrifying — too big, too outworldly, too destructive — and you don’t want to look, but Father keeps you out of the shelters just so you can. So you do._

_You’re gonna go and get them, that’s the promise._

_As everyone drowns in the horror of an impossible war, you’re gonna go and get them._

_Father’s hand under your chin, encouraging you to not avert your gaze as the monsters, kilometers away, raze San Francisco to the ground. You don’t want to know what happens if you don’t want to go and get them._

_But we’re gonna go and get them, Father says. And for a we, you will face the monsters._

****

_Beat after beat, bruise after bruise, crack after crack. Emptiness is an existential condition made of more than just hunger._

_It’s not like you forgot the list, but it’s the list that ceased to serve you in your quest towards turning every A+ and smiling teacher into an escape route._

_What is a list, when monsters are rising from the sea — all the way from the Pacific — and it doesn’t matter that you’re on the West Coast and you’ve never even seen the sea, Father is feeling the crisis. It’s worse than any other crisis over which he had no control, and you already paid for those._

_You’re gonna pay for this one, too, and you know it._

_You failed to imagine how, though, because the end of the world apparently called for creativity._

_It’s the first time you really end up in such a bad state outside of the trailer. The metal steps hurt, one after the other. Getting hit on the head always makes everything surreal, it’s like feeling it while being on the outside._

_Again and again and you don’t know when it’s stops._

_You just know the week’s money from three jobs are gonna go into replacing everything you dirtied with blood._

_And you pray, and you pray, but no one has ever listened and your left side remains silent._

_It’s not even quiet, because the torment of it starts after. Unprompted pain, as if you’re not getting enough of it, your body and brain screaming at you about all the ways you can’t function properly if you’re deaf in one ear. Even the internet says so — sensory processing disorder._

_Catching sight of the pamphlets is so surreal that it fits the nightmare that reality has become._

_Pan Pacific Defence Corps. Now recruiting._

_There is even a man in a pristine uniform coming all the way to Virginia. A video, which is borderline impossible for you to hear in a room full of people, but everything is in shape, everything is in order. And it doesn’t seem so unreachable, there are a boy and a girl speaking through several sections of the video and they must be around his age — brother and sister, impeccable. And even another boy, always caught on camera doing stuff without having to interact with it._

_You chase the officier around for all the three days of his stay._

_Your father countersigns because he thinks the base is going to be in Virginia and he’s gonna get all the money._

_You ship off two weeks later, and you know — you know — he will never be able to reach you again to complain that you’re a liar._

****

_Get up, he says, only to toss you back to the floor. Again, he says, but it will never be good enough to be the last time._

_There is a boy with big hazel eyes that starts like a stranger and ends up like a brother — he, too, is going down and back up with you. But he’s matching with his sister and instead you really need to climb this mountain — to reach your Father at the top of it — before he leaves you behind for good._

_Get up, again. Stronger, neater. More, faster._

_Father’s project materialises in the form of giant robots, and it looks like a movie but it’s the outcome of a lifetime. Your brother is allowed around the projects, you’re not, but that’s because you’re special — you’re gonna make this work._

_You only figure out how in a bundle of cables and weird liquids._

_Your father echoes like a bell in your brain — so much older, so much stronger, so clever and focused. It takes just a second, to bend into shape. But when you do you know you will never be apart again and this approval will always be yours._

_You’re unique. A partner, a pair, the perfect son._

_You’re gonna go, you’re gonna get the monsters. You’re gonna fight this, you’re gonna end this._

_But at some point it looks like the monsters are coming to get you, no matter how much equipment you build, how much you train, how beautifully the Jaegers are evolving. The monsters keep coming. And the war is not ending._

_The blaring sirens of the Code Blue sneak their way into your dreams, you hear the call even when there is no call. The drift etches its way on your skin, in your soul._

_But you stay up, and you’re gonna get them, because that’s what you and Father are doing._

 

~~~~

In the background of their conscience, the hutch was flashing red and orange with the alerts.

“ _Drift conflict. Drift conflict._ ”

“I want them _off_ this synch, for fuck’s sake!” A male voice barked through the comms — Declan. Worried. “I don’t care _how_ , make it happen!”

Waves slid against each other on the screen, occupying the whole field of vision, as the timestamp went on. Flickering, jumping, never matching. 

It was still not even a minute in.

~~~~

 

_The Corps give you back the sounds, and provide you with a new quest._

_You will be a pilot._

_Studying is not new, resourcefulness is appreciated rather than punished, your drive brings you on top and it feels better than the A+. It hurts, too, sometimes, but always with a purpose, rather than on a whim, and you feel stronger from it even though no one is telling you it ‘builds character’._

_You’re out. And you will make something epic of your new life._

_When they tell you you’re testing the synch, the Jaegers seems within reach. Close enough to touch._

_Father has never found you — until he does, and it’s not what you made contingencies plans for._

_When he finds you in the drift, he’s a monster more chirurgic than the Kaijus, destroying your life from the inside out._

_The fact that you’re too stubborn to let go completely — that you made an art out of keeping it up when there is no up — doesn’t mean there is somewhere left to go to. Not really._

****

_You’re gonna go, you’re gonna get them. Or you’re gonna die trying, at the brink of extinction, all the way to that Rim._

_You drop at the bottom of the Ocean with the only real family you have — the only family that will ever matter, Fox and Glendower and Father beside you. Staring at the mouth of Hell, it’s just you two, though. As it has always been._

_Through the glitching contacts you can hear the others doing the impossible to hold the line for you. You know you’re gonna do the impossible to finish this for them — the choice is already settled, unquestionable, and Greywaren is gonna take a drifting leap inside the Rim and detonate, if sending the bomb through proves impossible._

_It’s this close. This close to be the only choice. Dying in your Jaeger is the only thing that makes sense._

_But then you don’t, and somehow you make it through. Somehow the sun is still shining. Your family has lost so much — but the world is safe._

_You went and you got them._

_You want to feel the relief but you keep dreaming of the call during the night, and the battle at the bottom of the ocean, and every battle you’ve ever fought._

_The real relief is going back on the Jaeger to clean up everything, and then you don’t need to think about the after._

_You went, you got them, and yet something comes to get you._

_Death. Death, death, death._

_If you ever wondered what awaited you over the brink of your life, Father just showed you, through the drift._

_Agony. Nothingness. And it never goes away._

 

~~~~

One minutes and fifteen seconds in, the conflict seemed to worsen rather than lessening.

Too much, too strong, too soon, too raw. The hutch was full of intermittent screams.

The alerts rang furiously and the two curves kept clashing, hysterically. 

And yet no combined effort from the whole commanding bridge managed to persuade the Greywaren to drop a drifting synch the pilot had personally initialised.

~~~~

 

The first flash of memories had revolved in a crazy spin but everything kept running around them, floating out of shape like the little rainbows on the surface of a soap bubble — deceptive, inconsistent. Twenty years of two lives would not be settled quietly, a lot to discern, too much to handle. 

They stood right across each other, like two bubbles touching and merging at the edge, but they were an ocean away. 

They snatched back off each other, floating away. Too much.

Ronan was going to be violently sick, and yet with a masochistic drive he pushed himself back in focus. Focusing on Adam was like dumping his hands in a pool of shredded glass and let it cut all the way through him — lodging bloody in his arms, his hands, his chest, his face, the deeper Ronan insisted.

Adam was going to scream his head off, and yet he sunk into the echoing vacuum that lived in Ronan. It meant being stripped of everything, as the emptiness took and took and took, and any anger was too strong at first. Each and every feeling was too much when it wasn’t nothing at all.

Just like that, they were back in contact, standing face to face. But an ocean ran through them, vertical. One second, it was thin like an artificial waterfall — the next, it had the width of the Pacific and they, themselves, where the rim that had splitted it hellishly.

They looked around themselves, at the memories that kept running, too fast to catch. 

A contact fluttered through their bubbles, and then there was a book stuck in their ocean. They both knew it, a stray piece of old literature in the digital library of the Shatterdome, materialised with paper and pages in the drift. It was not supposed to be there, but it was — they both thought it was their secret, but they must be sharing it.

The story of a man, looking for a new home after a decennal war left him with nothing.

They dropped their gaze, then lift it back up.

“Forsan et…” Ronan started.

“...haec olim…” Adam took the cue.

“...meminisse iuvabit.”

One voice only, to finish.

Adam placed his hands, strong and capable and just perfect, between them, and pushed. Ronan pressed forward, a weird eagerness that both of them craved, but to which none of them wanted to cave.

They didn’t need to, though. They were just there, one in front of the other. 

Ronan grinned, like a maniac, and Adam smiled just the same, elastic and easy. Just like that.

The ocean burned.

Everything burned, even their memories through the fire. It wasn’t Ronan’s fire, and it wasn’t Adam’s, so it could just be _theirs_. 

They crashed, but in unison. There was _contact_.

The ocean _burned_.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“Send the antiphasing signal, I don’t care if we burn 3 million dollars in connectors!” Declan’s voice topped all the clamor coming from the commanding bridge — too many people, too much anxiety. 

“Wait!” This was Helen, insistent and unmistakable. “Wait wait wait.”

The sensors picked something up before anyone else. A _blip_ , from red to yellow. 

The brain waves clashed, and conflicted — never the right amplitude, never the right frequency.

But then they caught together, in a low minimum point, and there was a point of paroxysm. They shook, whipping around like chords in a hurricane. And in the process, they found one another — adding up and smoothing through. 

Ronan’s eyes blinked into focus as the sensors sweeped from yellow to green — a wave like the one of their drifting curve, running sharp and almost off-scale in the graph. 

Adam was there, just in his mind, unknown but not _unknowable_. 

And when Ronan pushed a hand forward in the harness, Adam did just the same, the movement echoing between the two of them and through their Jaeger.

Greywaren’s arms detached from the security locks.

Through the comms, there was an uncertain second of lingering silence.

“Greywaren,” Calla’s voice came, aseptic and yet still somehow tentative. “Do you copy?”

With a triumphant, _Neural handshake established, drift active_ , the system minimised the report window and cleared the screen for the pilot stats. Ronan’s heart chased, sympathetic, after Adam’s — whose chest drummed with the novelty of it all.

Ronan turned to look at him, even though he didn’t have to. He rubbed distractedly at his own shoulder to clear away the blood that had pooled on his lips through this brutal drifting. Adam met Ronan’s gaze halfway, blue eyes bright and wide and trail of red from his nose, marking his upper lip. They trembled in each other’s veins. 

They were on. They were _on_.

“Greywaren, do you copy?” Calla snarked. Ronan recognised that tone much better.

They canted in the harness again, a synched clanging of the commands as the Jaeger lost the last of the safety locks and attached to the launching board.

“Copy,” they said, together. “Ready to deploy.”

On the other side of the idling hangar, the Operation Hall howled, sharing the success. Even in the high-definition transmission, it was too many people to discern who was where, but Adam nervously tried nonetheless. Ronan didn’t know if they participated with this much enthusiasm to other operations — but Adam’s train of thought told him they did, from the very first one Adam saw all the way to Doomsday, the Shatterdome went to war as one entity.

“What’s the status on Raven King?” Ronan asked, brought back into focus even as his stomach was still pooled with warmth, and ice, and coiling snakes. 

“Still radio silent.” And with her son on it, but General Astrid Gansey was remarkably even-handed in communicating it. 

Ronan wasn’t the only one that wanted them back — Gansey, but his damn team too, because that’s how the high-ranks had always worked. Adam, too, was ready for this. Whatever it might take.

“Send the coordinates, we’re locking a warping leap.” Ronan said, and at his prompt the top layers of the hangar slid off one by one to allow for launching.

“In all likelihood you’ll be off comms in the area.” Maura reminded them, but still all the debrief documents on the area started popping up in the system. 

“A fucking party,” Ronan hummed through clenched teeth. 

There was also another thing left to do, before deploying, which had nothing to do with the last checks on the weapon charging. Ronan looked at Adam, again — in his father’s spot, with his father’s suit, but _with Ronan_ , inextricably, in the drift. 

Adam’s concern was fundamental and analytic, never shying away with pity. Ronan thinned his lips, and let the certainty of it settle in his mind, just like Adam, right there — beside him.

“Pilot override,” he declared, chin up and looking forward. “Update positions settings, head pilot to Ronan Lynch. New pilot authorisation to be cleared in position A.”

Adam took a long inhale, and Ronan felt the surreality of what he was about to do — signing this for good, downgrade his father out of the active autorisation list. The system quickly compiled all the information directly available through the connection, but then pinged. Waiting, for the vocal recognition. 

“Adam Parrish,” Adam said, when Ronan tilted his head in encouragement.

_Pilot updated: Greywaren B — Adam Parrish._

Ronan’s own fingers tingle with how tight Adam was gripping at his handles. 

“You can try it,” Ronan said, chasing thoughts that weren’t his own. “But you’ll have to trust me to show you the ropes.” 

“Sure, _expert_ ,” Adam countered, but his nervousness rattled between them. The Dreamcatcher technology was — had always been — a Lynch exclusive. Born from Niall’s madness, executed by father and son over and over again. But this time, the Greywaren came alive to Adam’s voice. “Maximum output to Dreamcatcher. Lock position to coordinates.”

The ramp was lifting them out of the hangar. In the meantime, they climbed the rest of the way out with a jump — just as agile as they both were with their stick, but this was not a training ring. 

“The recharging issue is still unpredictable,” Declan notified them from the commanding bridge. With a fraction of a gesture, Ronan brought up the full close-up of the bridge console. A lineup of all their high-ranks — Maura, Calla, Declan, Helen, General Gansey — but there were people moving in the background, too, at times. “So _please_ account for the fact that you won’t warp again on the place, not fast.”

“We’ll manage,” Ronan countered with all the certainty he was able to feel, even while Adam’s mind whirred in technical thoughts beside him.

“Support is still on its way,” Helen told them, standing behind Declan’s chair where she had been evidently arguing about the neural connection issues. “You’re gonna have backup, and extraction. Just...get to the extraction, okay?”

“I’ll land Dick’s ass to the backup, no worries,” Ronan snarled, all nerves. It took them a bit to get going — and, before, it was so quick for Niall to die. 

Adam reassessed their position on the clear grounds that opened all the way to the harbour. It was kilometers away, but Jaegers were tall, and Greywaren was stunningly fast. His mind was a stable, sturdy ground, for all of Ronan’s worries. Not because Adam didn’t have any, not because he didn’t share them either — there were flashes, of Gansey, and Blue, and Henry, they needed them _back_ — but because anxiety crystallised into practicality.

Running with Adam was different, too — like shaking atrophied muscles, or trying to reshape your body as you try and walk on a trampoline. Ronan felt the habit built through their practice kicking in, though, as they both figured out each other and the little quirks of their movements. 

“ _Warping available_ ,” the disembodied voice of Greywaren came almost cheerfully. 

“Buckle the fuck up, Parrish, we’re gonna _bang it_.”

The countdown ran through his own mind. _Five. Four. Three._ The Greywaren wasn’t pushing back at him this time, the drift bubbled with the novelty of Adam in the mix. When he channelled the location and they started running, the focus Ronan had on an overall mapping of the location was too bright to be just his own. _Two. One._ There was thunder, thunder approaching, just at the tip of his tongue.

_Zero._

Both feet jumped off the ground and reality compressed around them, blackening their vision and pressing on their eardrums as Greywaren worked its magic. 

It lasted forever, with surreal light dancing on Ronan’s retina, mutable and coloured. It took only five seconds, and there was new ground under their feet. Ronan’s mind wandered at the usual verge of unconsciousness that warping left behind — and at the same time, there was something new, something that crackled with energy through the drift.

“Fuck,” Adam laughed, empathetically, and Ronan stumbled into focus again following the sound. He had never, Ronan realised, heard him laugh. “You really know how to bang this.”

It was Adam that stadied their position and surveyed their surrounding, at first — it was a comfort to have him, a nice balance even while Ronan refocused from shouldering the drift.

“Practice makes perfect and all that shit,” Ronan shook his head a bit, and engaged two of the close-to-medium contact weapons of Greywaren, just in case.

_‘Dreamcatcher’ status: charging. Next warping available in: 00.01.17._

“For fuck’s sake,” Ronan groaned. It was better than last time — better in all so many sense — and hundreds of kilometers of leap could easily justify the wait, but it was still _long_.

“Greywaren to HQ,” Adam tried to call through the comms — the weirdness of it still fresh between them. A low crackle of static was the only response. Funnily enough, that meant they were in the right place — for Raven King.

“Implement drift harmonics comms,” Ronan ordered at the system. If another Jaeger was close enough, they will be able to communicate through something that was not blanketed by whatever was blocking the comms. Still, nothing came through immediately. “Where the fuck…”

A bang came from the distance. Then a rumble. 

Ronan and Adam glanced at each other and they started to run. The landscape was uneven, what used to be a mostly flat island before the Kaiju’s invasion had been violently overturned by multiple passages and earth-shattering impacts. There were hills, and protruding rocks, uneven vegetation.

_Next warping available in: 00.01.09._

“What’s the power threshold for availability?” Adam asked, as they moved in synch. 

Ronan could feel Adam’s thoughts whirring, technical in a foreign way. He opened his mouth to answer and he had the disconcerting moment in which his own mind lagged behind — Niall had always dominated the technicals, even details that had never been written down for public consumption, since Greywaren was always meant to be for the Lynches’ _exclusive_ benefit. Ronan used to know — or to be _conscious_ of it, at least — when his father was there with him. But now he felt like a library stripped of half its books and with a messed up catalogue. 

Adam was worried, even though he rarely changed expression to show it. “Don’t worry, just…” He hesitated. Then he faced the screen, taking the liberty of addressing the system directly — as he should. “Plot last energy consumption, time _vs_ percentage of Dreamcatcher availability.”

With the battle-engaged mode, the screen always prioritised field vision, but Greywaren pinged up the elaboration in no time, the graph partially transparent in their vision. They had drained the Dreamcatcher in one go, and Ronan knew the only way to get more than the reported 100% they started from on the screen was shutting off most of all the other systems. He had done it, to run away.

The current curve was just recovering at 19%.

Ronan chased Adam’s thought calculating idly, while Adam in turn followed Ronan’s proficiency in piloting to keep closing their distance.

“I just think it’s non-linear at the beginning,” Adam commented out loud, his thoughts following the way the line had jumped to recover more energy after having dropped at 0% from draining. “We can be a bit creative with it…”

Both his words and his thoughts trailed off, as they leaped off a hill and other crash came just to their left.

Raven King was rolling at the side of a rock, with more weapons engaged than two arms and two legs were actually capable of holding. They saw it clearly for just a second, through the explosion of something that had crashed hard against the rock. Then the Jaeger was covered again, chased around by black metallic spherical shapes that hummed like a swarm of wasps. 

It was too many of them and they tended to attach at any given a chance. Just a glimpse of the damage, and a quick diagnostic assessments provided as a colour map by Greywaren, and Ronan realised there was damage on the Raven King outer layers. 

They moved without need of discussing it, barging into battle in perpendicular to the direction in which Raven King was moving, trying to escape from the aggressive black cloud.

It was difficult to engage, with the objects so close to the other Jaeger, but they shoot a series of harpoons from the left arm, leaving the right for fragmentation projectiles, and they went to catch whichever metal-wasp was lagging behind. 

The drift harmonics came alive in the comm with a low whistle.

“Ronan?” Gansey was strained, and disbelieving, and so _so_ alive. 

“No, the Mad Hatter,” Ronan replied with a face-splitting grin that only grew wider as they got closer with Greywaren to engage directly. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

Brought by the frequencies of two drifts pairing up, the faces of Gansey, Blue and Henry came into focus in a small transmission window, half in transparency. Ronan winked, knowing their pilot hutch was live in Raven King in return.

“Oh my god, _Adam,_ ” Blue gaped. 

“Hi, we’re here to help,” Adam replied, almost awkward and in complete contrast with the violence with which he was piloting with Ronan.

“Wow.” Henry sounded genuinely surprised, but between the three of them they mostly looked worn out.

They let the projectiles recharge and focused on using the harpoons to do damage even while recalling them back. The swarm was moving like a cloud, agitated and evidently struggling to react to the change. 

“What the fuck do we have here?” Ronan gritted out, glaring at both the attacking mass and the blinking report of Greywaren — rather uncooperative but disgustingly familiar in its, _Threat: unknown._

“No idea but it’s a ton of them and they’re after maximum damage, if they touch you they…”

Ronan had a good idea of what they would do already, but he never got to hear it from Gansey because the swarm lifted suddenly away from them, looming dark from the top. Both Jaegers shot at them with everything they got — which was admittedly _a lot_ considering that Raven King had weaponised sections of the body, available for individual manipulation by virtue of having two pilots instead of three. But the mass was too extensive to pierce a proper damage like this.

Ronan exchanged a glance with Gansey and they were just detaching the bombs from the equipment when the swarm refocused. And this time, it came after Greywaren with renewed fury.

“Jesus Mary _fuck_ ,” Ronan swore, reflexively, even as he and Adam guided the Jaeger not only to dodge and not get caught in the centre but also to smash some part of these pseudo-wasps against the rocks. 

_Next warping available in: 00.00.37._

Adam was excellent in matching him through the movements, as responsive to tactical needs in the drift as he had been on the training field. But at the same time, Ronan had a background awareness of something that felt like calculations. Lacking of familiarity was still a problem while trying to keep track of weapons, enemies, a Jaeger and the field. 

“Parrish, I can _feel you_ thinking, what the fuck?” 

“Maybe we can downcharge the warping and have it faster but I can’t check with HQ…”

Ronan frowned, struggling to not get latched on by the wasps for too long and following the White Rabbit in Adam’s mind. He still got the overall concept — leaping, but just a bit, dodge off the swarm, a whole lot of metrics approximations. They could basically try and freeform.

“Cool, give me the issue in one sentence or less,” Ronan gritted out, as they moved furiously to open up the swarm enough for Raven King to support them with the hits without risking damaging Greywaren in the process. Just the same Ronan and Adam had just done for them, but reversed because Greywaren was apparently more interesting.

“Using the recharge regime close to zero is a non-linear mess and we’re kind of busy for me to _calculate_ ,” Adam hissed out, spreading Greywaren’s left hand to electroduct a wasp out of their Jaeger’s leg and tossing it off for it to explode close to the others that were already closing over.

“ _Nerd,_ ” Ronan hissed out, but smiled through it. “I think you can run it through the O.P.A.L.”

They weren’t looking at each other but the raised eyebrow of Adam’s perplexity at the acronym passed through the drift. Out loud, to the Raven King trio who just cut their tail of robotic wasps, he just said, “Thanks.”

“Operative Performance Assist Live-frame,” Ronan rattled out, marking every word with the hit of a different weapon — taser gun, fragmentation projectiles, harpoons in close contact and at some point even a net, that proved useless as the swarm crushed it together and tried to drag the whole Jaeger forward.

Through the commotion, the AI system that ran the Jaeger blipped vaguely, in recognition of the full name — seemly almost for Adam’s sake. The screen still read, _Next warping available in: 00.00.09._

“Ah!” Adam piped up, understanding, even through the struggle of calibrating the weapons, exchanging equipment, following too many movements. He was very talented, but Ronan could see the fatigue in him — and the way he leaned mindlessly against Ronan’s conscience, letting Ronan’s operative proficiency flow through. “Opal, I need a capping of the power output of Dreamcatcher in the non-linear dynamic range. Is it like 25%?”

Ronan snorted, hearing more clearly than sound alone the way Adam addressed the AI as if it had a given name. Still, the O.P.A.L. helpfully flashed a number on the screen, _29.7583%._

“Okay, then, make it 30% maximum for every warp,” Adam started, panting a bit.

“Parrish, the system is connected through the drift, just _think it clearly_.” Ronan suggested, still smiling, because he could feel the thoughts running faster than Adam could give directions. “Settle this technical shit, I’m handling this.”

_This_ was the exquisitely virulent task of keeping track of the damn pseudo-wasps, the damages on Greywaren every time they latched on for too long, and trying to coordinate with Raven King — who got fringes of wasps every time they tried to break the chase and cut the tail off when Ronan sprinted off with Greywaren.

_“Warping available.”_

Ronan did nothing. Adam was exquisitely in synch with him, following Ronan’s will and movements as if it were his own, but Ronan could almost _see_ Adam’s thoughts wind up in giving directions to the AI. He was brilliant, and ruthless, and sharp like a diamond saw. It was difficult not to get distracted for way too many reasons. 

“Guys, do we have a plan?” Gansey asked, used to the stilted conversation of two copilots conversing with more than words. “Are you warping?”

 

“Not yet,” Ronan gritted out. There were plots popping on and off the screens, and Ronan gave in to the temptation of glancing at Adam — his profile full of shadows in the uneven light of the hutch, frowned in concentration, with sweat plastering the hair on his forehead. It made something ache deep inside Ronan. He turned away fully, back at glancing at the Raven King team through the comms even while trying to lead the swarm back against a wall of rock. “We’ll be trying a warp-dodge, basically, you need to annihilate these fuckers every time we get out of the way.”

“We’re a bit short of ammo,” Blue admitted after a quick survey.

“Okay, pick it up after me, Adam is almost done.” Ronan sweavered again, trying not to do anything that would require too much cooperation from Adam who was in the process of making the AI plot time evolutions of recharging and approximating parameters. 

Feeling very much like a silly character in a fairly tail, he gradually dropped 90% of Greywaren’s explosive ammo behind him, untriggered and free for Raven King to collect.

Adam got to a steady point, and Ronan felt it through the nervous thrumming of his own heart. 

“We’re set but it’s very approximate, I won’t know how far we’ll dodge until we start,” Adam Adam spoke for himself, this time, but eyed Ronan with some uncertainty. 

“Ready when you are. Nice and clean, they cluster, you move under their nose, we go kaboom?” Henry summarised. 

“It can’t be steady, the recharge is not steady,” Adam struggled to explain bringing up a plot in double sharing for the five of them to see. 

It was a very approximated model of where their 30% peaks for warping were going to be, unevenly misplaced with two few seconds of elaboration time to be smooth and cross-sourced.

The frowns coming from the Raven King trio, even while they slashed through another small section of wasps, were telling.

“We need to be timed but it’s not a constant timing,” Ronan picked up with more clarity, following Adam’s gloriously raw train of thought. He grinned at him “You want some music, Parrish?”

Adam lit up at the suggestion. Even Gansey gave an interested hum.

“If we both know it, we’ve got it covered,” Gansey suggested, making good use of the ten years they had spent together. 

They basically kicked out some wasps against each other with electroducting hits from Greywaren’s feet, and Ronan suggested. “Murder Squash song?”

“I’ll kill you in your sleep, Lynch,” Gansey countered immediately.

“What’s the squash song?” Henry asked, immediately curious of what brought this much acrimony. 

“You _really_ don’t want to know,” Gansey assured to Henry.

“I think he kind of does,” Ronan called over with a shit-eating grin. “I’ll tell you when we’re not on a clock, Cheng, it’s a fucking banger.” 

Adam eyerolled a bit, but still Ronan felt their thoughts lining up together, shuffling through Ronan’s ideas of _possible music_. “That could work.”

“I knew you had a taste, Parrish.” Ronan complimented, still grinning and glancing him over while they jumped in little jerks up a rocky hill. “Opal, hit it.”

Catching the request from his mind, in an undignified use of the most advanced AI system on Earth as a jukebox, music started thrumming through the hutch — not just theirs, but Raven King’s too, through the drift comms. It began low, all bass, but steadily charged up with electronic tunes, catching in a grating way.

“Ronan, my ears are _bleeding_ ,” Gansey complained, but Raven King got in position across them, grenades lined up and ready for triggering. Gansey knew this song, so he and his copilots would know their cues.

“Bullshit,” Ronan said with ease. It was better, with music, they should have it more often.

They stopped, almost at a cliff-edge, and waited for the swarm to cluster around them, like a cloud.

Adam’s was clutching very hard at his handles again.

“I’m fast enough,” Ronan whispered to him, turning just one second to look at him — replying to unexpressed anxiety, and the knowledge that igniting the drift to the tune of a song required more skills than a first-timer like Adam. The first-timer had some brutal tactics, though. “This is gonna be _clusterfuckfest_.”

It kind of was, as soon as they started. 

Ronan had never used the warp like this, in jerks and leaps and unpredictable little dodges — like a poorly fitted lightbulb that kept flickering on and off. He wouldn’t even know how to, in all honesty, but he wasn’t alone — and Adam’s mind was all sparks, chasing Ronan’s in the knowledge of the music, of Dreamcatcher, and in turn keeping track of obscure graphs.

The swarm clustered, and they leaped off twenty meters to the left — barely enough to put Greywaren off contact, and leave the pseudo-wasps hanging like a cloud around the empty air. 

Raven King stuck in that very moment, and the bomb detonated.

It was close enough that even Adam and Ronan felt it. It was precarious and risky but when the smoke from the explosion cleared the swarm was decimated. 

“Come on, Parrish,” Ronan hissed, the thrill of a well-executed and completely deranged plan coursing through him — through them. 

They ran, and the swarm followed, evidently incapable of changing course just because they were falling in a trap — dangerous weapons but not directly controlled. 

Clustering. Leaping. Bombing.

Again, and again, and again.

It gave a new tune to a song Ronan used to listen with Gansey while training, bringing all five of them into a steady flow of movements. 

It was almost surreal when the smoke cleared and it was clear that nothing of this swarm would survive another round. Whatever acrimony the pseudo-wasps had towards Greywaren was still stronger than anything, though, because they charged once more. And Greywaren, once again, stayed still to let them catch it. Almost.

Dodge. 

_Boom._

They all stopped into an awkward stillness, made anticlimactic by the music still running in the background of their Jaegers. 

The system caught up with the situation before the smoke even cleared again and the light in the hutch changed hue, automatically removing the _engaged_ setting. In the upper centre, a little report flashed in green.

_No threat detected._

“Oh my God,” came through the comms from Raven King, with Blue, Gansey and Henry speaking in one voice. 

It had sounded corny, before, to hear them do it while stranded in the Hall. Now, with Adam flopping in his harness at his side, Ronan could sympathise. They were heaving in pants, and Adam was more strained than Ronan was, but each of their breaths was in perfect synch. Ronan liked the sound of it, in a deep, visceral way. 

“Remove the capping,” Adam murmured to the O.P.A.L., always forward thinking — just in case something else came. 

Ronan felt vaguely hysterical — on the verge of laughing, or crying, or both. Adam’s eyes were on him as soon as the sensation passed through the drift, and Ronan felt them without looking, worsening the situation.

“Ronan?”

Adam didn’t usually use his name. But after all, neither did Ronan. It was weird, it was good, it was too much and not enough.

“Adam, you’re _batshit crazy._ ”

At this, Adam laughed, again, catching it for the compliment it was. 

Around them, Tarama Island was a disaster of debris and burned residuals of the pseudo-wasps, mostly still fuming from the bombing, but also crashed around from the painstaking removal they attempted before rolling with Adam’s plan. The deep black of their bodies glittered in the innocent light of the morning, with blue skies and blue sea serenely unaware of the madness that had ensued.

As for every battle, it was so short, looking back.

“We won’t have much to bring back for analysis,” Gansey contemplated. He and Adam probably had a similar brand of tactical skills, going at it with two very different approach — it was profoundly unfamiliar, for Ronan, to compare Gansey to anyone. 

Adam was looking at him funny, a little smirk on his lips and a dissecting interest on Ronan’s assessments of relationships and interactions — it was weird for him too, to be there, for the first time, after having seen it from afar. 

Ronan did what he rarely allowed himself to do in a Jaeger and closed his eyes against the slow unwinding of adrenaline, pushing thoughts back and forth between himself and Adam.

It had always been like this after battle, but Niall’s thoughts had grown to feel almost endemic — and this, instead, was so new, almost unripe. 

“We should collect what we can, maybe find something more in one piece. I think this stuff is really on an agenda, they got obsessive with Greywaren,” Blue’s voice still came through the comms in harmonics. 

“But can we bring it back?” Henry asked.

Ronan didn’t open his eyes but felt Adam shaking away from the contemplation they were sharing — not completely, as if they were leaning shoulder to shoulder. It was a nice visual.

“Heavy backup is coming to get us, we just got here faster,” Adam said, frowning a couple of inquiries to O.P.A.L., remarkably sturdy even in a clear state of fatigue. 

“Well, if we really got rid of this annoyance, this time, we should be able to get an estimate. Ping through the comms channel for HQ,” Gansey directed Raven King system.

They all stood more still than actual practicality demanded, waiting for the transmitter to screen through the available frequencies and catch each and every channel the Shatterdome might be trying to communicate through. A low rattle brought them all to attention.

“Raven King,” Maura’s voice came, almost spelling out. No rushing, no evident hope, and that, in itself, was agitated for the standards. “Status?”

“All clear, superficial damage, no casualties, unknown threat eliminated with Grewyaren’s aid,” Gansey listed out, rapidly and in perfect adherence with the protocol.

“Activate video transmission,” Ronan asked, before adding, “Greywaren, all clear, copy.” 

On the other side of the transmission, the whole board at the commanding bridge rearranged on their seats, in what felt like a collective wave of relief — almost taken by surprise maybe. Even General Gansey looked over her daughter with a nod. 

“Excellent, the recovery team is still on the way, you have an ETA of 5 hours.” The General informed them. “Good job, we’ll wait for a full report _eagerly_.”

By the tension running through the drift, Adam must have interpreted it for the vague threat that it was. There was clamour in the background, from the general comms in the Hall of the Shatterdome — a familiar sound for both of them, the Corps celebrating the success of their pilots. But for the first time, Adam was on the other side of it. 

Ronan poked distractedly through Adam’s superficial memories on the concept, getting glimpses of missions with dubious outcome through the years — Doomsday in particular was fresh and also incredibly long as a wait with shaky connection.

“You’re so nosey,” Adam whispered to him, puzzled by the sensation of Ronan rifling through his mind. 

Ronan shrugged, running diagnostics on the system just to multitask instead of ending up obsessive. “One of us needs to have intellectual curiosity.”

Adam rolled his eyes, and once again Ronan felt it as a concept rather than seeing it. “I just don’t know how to do this.” 

But even as he said it, Ronan could feel the slight push back — and for someone whose neural handshake required a run through shredded glass, Adam was surprisingly measured in his counter-drifting. Ronan’s shivered reflexively at the feeling of his mind getting a sweep through like an unknown piece of equipment. And among all possibilities, Adam was latching on Gansey’s decennal protests on Ronan’s tastes in music and Murder Squash songs. 

Ronan laughed under his breath without saying anything out loud.

“Guys, what about lending a hand here?” Blue called over through the comms, breaking the idle moment that had overcome them.

The embarrassment was shared as well — over having stood there lost in each other’s thoughts, as a weird outlet to fatigue. 

Five hours had sounded infinite when General Gansey first announced it, but in reality they passed faster than they would have thought — just like battles felt longer than they actually were.

Trying to pack up the remains of the wasps and secure them in the empty weaponry lockers of the Jaeger without risking cross-contamination took most of their time, with Declan overseeing the proceedings through the comms with his unique brand of pickiness.

“That’s gonna end in your lab, I’m sure you can handle this later,” Ronan protested, after having been forced to painstaking rundown.

“The fact that it’s gonna end in my lab is exactly the reason why you’re not gonna make a mess of it now,” Declan countered drily. There was still tension in his voice from earlier in the day and even through the comms Ronan totally got that Adam was getting the most of his suspiciousness.

The feeling didn’t lessen when they started giving their report after boarding on the two different high-speed cargo that have been sent to recover them. 

With the comms still on, he got to listen to the Raven King trio report on what happened with the island. It echoed horribly with what had happened to himself and his father — inane Kaiju’s residues that weren’t really challenging, sudden appearance of something else that didn’t get on the threat radar before. Even though Gansey didn’t say anything that could be counted as conjecture on official records, their eyes met though the comms and Ronan got that the similarities ran even deeper. 

Then it was Ronan’s turn to give his account of the events at the arrival — the way they apparently got most of the attention from the wasps, the change of plans, the successful annihilation of the unknown threat. And that, in itself, seemed to get both he and Adam stuck in an eternal back and forth with the headquarter. Gansey and his team were dismissed to go and disengage from the drift — as even the internal system of Raven King suggested an idle for health and safety protocols — but the whole high-ranking board still had a lot to ask about what Greywaren had done. Even more so, what Adam had done in Greywaren.

“No, Ma’am, I’m not familiar with the drifting system. I relied on Colonel Lynch’s knowledge, and the AI had several insights.” Adam reiterated once again, amazingly composed considering that it was the fourth round of questioning his manuveure with the capping.

“Okay, are we reporting for insubordination because Parrish had a nice tactic or what?” Ronan cut through, getting antsier by the second — the fact that he could sense Adam’s discomfort, both physical and mental, didn’t help quenching the harshness on the delivery.

“Don’t tempt me, Colonel, I’m this close to revising the critical compromise protocol considering your abuse of it,” General Astrid Gansey reproached, glacially.

“I oppose the definition, we were in critical compromise and we came out with low damages. Is the outrage because it _worked_?” Ronan challenged, in plain contrast with Adam’s composed approach to the authority. He was still his father’s son, and Niall used to run this show one outrageously working idea at the time. 

“Jesus,” Maura sighed, with a hand running over her face. “No, we’re opposing this idea that everything can be wagered. But it worked, and you’re not under prosecution.”

“That was rather brilliant, Parrish,” Calla said, with an assessing smile. 

Adam straightened in the harness with more turmoil than what was evident from the subdued, “Thank you, Ma’am.”

“We’ll talk about it more when you’re back,” Declan said, giving an analytical glance to the notes he had been taking off screen on his tablets. “I suggest you disengage from Greywaren, actually, you’re too fresh considering that neural handshake before.”

“Both your cargo and the one with Raven King don’t have enough fuel to make it back in 5 hours with the Jaeger’s load, your ETA is tomorrow at 06:21,” Helen notified them. “Get some rest, pilots. Dismissed.”

The drift fluttered with Adam’s sense of weirdness at being called a _pilot_ , and something reluctant bubbled through Ronan’s mind, capricious. He realised almost belatedly that he didn’t want to disengage — not after months of being out of a Jaeger, even less so with the novelty that Adam brought into the drift. But through the drift itself Ronan had a clear sense of everything in Adam that harboured layers and layers of soreness.

“Disengage neural connection,” he notified O.P.A.L., before sliding his hands off the handles. 

Detached from its pilots — its new pilots — Greywaren started the power off routine with a low whirring noise. It echoed strangely in Ronan’s mind, the sound almost distorted and coming too slow. Or maybe it was just too focused, in Ronan’s own head, but everything came across as accessively silent. 

He was alone, again.

When he looked at Adam, emerging from the Jaeger just beside him, the puzzled expression on Adam’s face suggested that Adam was trying to make out the shape of his own brain as it was now. Ronan could guess but he couldn’t _know_ , not really, not properly. He gritted his teeth and made sure that the Greywaren was in full shut down, before making to move away from the humid, brackish air of the cargo hold. 

“What are you doing?” Ronan asked, as Adam crouched beside one of the status screens in a corner. _And why don’t I know what you’re doing already?_ , he should have completed, if he wanted to be fully truthful — but maybe some omission was warranted, in this case.

“Checking the security locks for Greywaren...I mean, just in case…” Even with his body tensed from exertion and awkward in moving with a piloting suit outside the hutch, Adam’s expression was stubbornly concentrated, his hands sliding off the screens following parameters at a glimpse.

Ronan stared — way too much — until he went to another report screen to bring up a map, and do virtually anything else but keep looking at Adam. “You’re obsessive. Come on, this cargo is half-deserted, but maybe we can find a place that’s not growing seaweeds.”

He started walking almost before finishing speaking, with the impulsive decision of not looking for anything better than what looked like a communal resting room for people that used to be on constant shifts on the bridges of this cargo. Passing by Adam, Ronan reached over and guided him up by his left elbow. 

Adam stumbled a bit, but didn’t actually squirm away. Ronan, in turn, couldn’t get himself to let go, not properly, just sliding his grip down to Adam’s forearm, just above his wrists — with no awkward connectors on the way, just the elastic fabric of the suit. He refused to look back at Adam through the corridors, but still lead him as if he knew where they were heading, rather than brutally improvising. 

If Adam was obsessive, what was he? 

The corridors were ghostly, devoid of any activities, and the doors had no real authentication system. A smash on the opening button outside of every room would suffice. 

Letting go of Adam once inside the randomly chosen room was irritating, in its own way, for Ronan who was still trying to settle himself in the absence of the drift. But Adam didn’t seem too talkative either, satisfied to move around gingerly and rummaging through the scarcely supplied cabinets. 

“Marine division style?” Adam suggested, lifting up a couple of spare work clothes from a neat pile in a drawer. 

Ronan shrugged. “Better than keeping the suit on. It’s gonna drive you crazy in a bit.”

“It already is, but I thought it was just me,” Adam admitted, tossing the clothes onto a desk.

The room was awkwardly arranged, most likely a multipurpose break room made of a composition of couches, tables, computers, supplies, and everything an officer might need at any given moment of a day. It would serve them just fine, at the moment. 

Ronan was more than satisfied to move to the “hygiene corner”, full of benches and smooth floor alongside cleaning equipment optimised for minimal water usage. Bumping into the activation button of one of those was enough to get a flash wash from laminar hot vapour.

“Quick and dirty,” he commented, stepping out and unclasping the only point on his suit that released the vacuum adherence of the fabric to get out of it.

“Quick and clean, you mean, those are a lifesaver after a shift,” Adam countered, getting into a flow spot as well. He followed Ronan with his eyes for a second — more than a second, and even longer before he actually turned around and activated the equipment. 

Ronan stared back while Adam was not there to catch him in the act, surrounded by white vapour as he was. Adam’s sweaty hair, brownish-blondish and getting darker as the flow lifted it up and then flopped it down. The line of adam's spine, interrupted periodically by the suit connectors. Adam’s hands, shaken distractedly as if to regain feeling in them. 

God, this was _a mess_

  
  


* * *

  
  


Facing the grey wall of the flash washer, Adam kept his lips thinned together, so no vapour could get into his mouth with the filth of the battle, but most importantly no graceless sentences could get out unchecked. 

Throughout his life, he had been in the thorns of the explosive mixture of tired and adrenalinic all too many times. He had _lived_ on it, in Virginia, as the only mean of survival, and it had dragged him through in the first months in the Corps, when a part of him insisted he was _this close_ to being catapulted back to hell. Then he had been just a Tech, but the world had been ending and _adrenalinic tiredness_ was the undertone of every Kaiju attack — before, during, after, because someone has to keep the Jaegers going and that someone is _the Techs_. But it had never, ever, been like this — in his skin, in his brain, at the tip of his tongue, the tip of his fingers. 

He had thought he knew the drift, from his tragic failures in the synch testing procedures.

Evidently, he had _no idea_.

There were muscles aching that had not existed before he had entered a Jaeger. The light was weird and too focused, whereas sounds lingered, diffused, even though his auditory support was working properly. All of this was like a blanket, tossed carelessly over the undeniable fact that his own mind was _quiet_ — quiet and claustrophobically _his own_. 

Thinking was like running in circles, chasing after an elusive escape that was not going to be there.

Ronan Lynch stood in the room a couple of feet away from him in a skin-tight suit full of connectors, a concert of nervous movements in disrobing. A day ago — some hours ago — the current distance between them would have been distractingly little. Now, after Greywaren, it was distractingly _excessive_ , flooding Adam with a constant awareness of every movement Ronan made even as he tried not to look. 

Adam had felt Ronan’s mind, Ronan’s _essence_. Uncompromising fury layered with more than just rage, a spiralling emptiness that always felt so close to reproachful and ready to swallow everything. A never-ending fight, with himself and with the world. _Get out, stay out_ — Ronan seemed to suggest about himself. But Adam had dived in and in and _in_ and had refused to let go. 

It had been worth it, to cling on it and _feel it_ — because Ronan felt just so much, in every declination, earnest and caring and uncontainable. And harbouring him in Adam’s brain was like cutting through the chase of any deadlock that paralysed Adam himself. 

He had made every impossible in Adam’s life possible, overturned everything in a configuration that Adam did not know how to handle, all in the span of some hours. 

And now he had slipped past Adam’s grip again, easy as a _disengage_.

That left Adam lonely and angry — angry because of his loneliness, lonely in handling his anger. 

He realised with several seconds of delay that the flash washing equipment was beeping for him to get out of the platform — aseptically clean, body and uniform, in 45 seconds and minimal water consumption. Even the efficiency of it was making Adam restless, and he needed out of the piloting suit because even looking down at himself and seeing just shimmery fabric and polished connectors felt like a dream — or a trick.

When he turned around and out of the machine, Ronan was facing half way, half towards Adam, wearing inane clothes that fit him poorly and made him look like a panther dressed as a housecat. 

It was probably worse, to know the strength of those shoulders when Ronan pulled the whole piloting harness back, to look at the line of that jaw and remember how fierce it had been when clenched, as Ronan’s mind exploded with thoughts of battle, urging everything forward like war drums.

When Ronan had decompressed his suit it had looked easy, and smooth, so of course when Adam attempted the same movement it was a clumsy failure with no outcome. He was sure there was a clip, a little leverage, he even theoretically knew, but it didn’t help in practice. And he caught himself trying to reach over, to pluck the answer from Ronan’s mind, only to find _nothing_.

“Wait, this fuckery is a damn mess,” Ronan uttered, catching on Adam’s struggles and coming to the rescue at Adam’s side without any explicit request. “Give me a second, it’s like...it’s a little dip around the third connector downwards, you need to press on both sides.”

Adam closed his eyes. Behind his back, Ronan was speaking as someone who assumed Adam would have to use this knowledge again — to pilot together again. The ache that ran through Adam’s body was deeper than the connectors, more complex than fatigue, and did not lessen fully when Ronan triggered the right valve and the whole suit lessened its grip, with a low whistle of air running through.

“Thank you,” Adam said, belatedly and distractedly. There was a soreness exacerbated by the release of the air-tight fixtures. “I didn’t think it was this uncomfortable.”

“It gets better after the first time.”

“How many times until it’s not like this?” 

“Even the second is better. After the fifth it’s basically fine. Maybe less, you’re kind of sturdy.” 

“Sturdy,” Adam uttered, and at the corner of his vision Ronan smiled. A smile full of sharp lines, as if Ronan didn’t know — or didn’t _care_ — what it meant for Adam. 

He had gone to Ronan, chasing after his call like a shipwrecked man lured by a siren. And now the ocean was still storming — no way to know if he would sink, no way to plan — but Adam was still being promised more. 

_More._

Adam hissed lowly at the subtle burn that spread against his skin as Ronan detached the connectors — delicately, in plain contrast with the attitude he would always broadcast to the world, but not in contrast with what his mind had whispered to Adam’s. 

Without the adherence enforced by vacuum, the suit detached easily — away from Adam’s shoulders, his back. Then his elbows, when Ronan got there. Adam followed the hint, more than the outright suggestion, and raised his hands for Ronan to detach the little hooks around his wrists. It burned again.

“This is an annoying point,” Ronan told him, and yet for him the sensors detached easily, away from the line of Adam’s veins and palms, peeling off from the fingers. “I always used my teeth to take them out at the beginning, but Calla told me to quit it if I didn’t want her biting my head off.” 

Adam smiled reflexively at the picture Ronan painted, but didn’t lift his gaze away from his right hand — their right hand, as Ronan’s slowly freed Adam’s from the fixtures. A young Ronan arguing with the higher ranks was an easy thing to imagine. Much more acceptable than the intrusive flash of Ronan’s teeth close to his wrists, ripping delicate equipment off — and yet Adam juggled with both. 

Ronan let go of the glove fixtures and they fell down almost soundlessly. Free from the latching, the top of the suit hang lax from the two connectors that still stood in their place at the top of Adam’s thighs. 

He felt exposed.

Ronan was standing behind him, slowly retreating his hands and sighing.

_This_ , Adam thought, _is another breath_. Not the one of Ronan in exertion when they sparred, nor — Adam now knew — the exhausting effect of a battle on a Jaeger. Not the one of Ronan on the floor of his room, lingering precariously towards sleep. Another.

“I can see the lines,” Adam said as he realised. 

“The drift marks?” Ronan asked, from behind him. Low, careful. 

Adam nodded, silently, turning his right hand in front of him. There were thin circular marks at the base of each of his fingers, running deeper along the palm and red at his wrist. Then thinner still, coming up to his shoulders. He turned his head to glance, pointlessly, past the line of his clavicle. 

His and Ronan’s eyes met in the process, just briefly, before Ronan averted his gaze again. 

“Of course they’re there. Always deeper in the back.” With the angle of his head, it looked like Ronan was surveying them. It made Adam’s back tingle all over again.

“I saw yours,” he confessed, on a whim. “They’re deep like scars.”

Ronan shrugged, entranced by something more than how many years he had spent with an analogous suit on to get a whole design on his back from it. His eyes were following something that Adam could not see. 

Adam swallowed, walking the edge between frustration and strangeness. He was being shown how to remove the suit, and then not quite.

“You have them too, now.” 

The tip of two fingers skimmed along the dip of Adam’s shoulder blades. They were warm at the contact, or maybe it was just Adam’s skin that had cooled too quickly. 

He stayed extremely still, with a little lingering awareness of how much Ronan had touched him today in comparison to every other measured contact that preceded this. 

They would fight, help each other up in the training rooms, every once in a while Ronan had been taken by some auspicious five minutes and had actually guided Adam through something worth teaching. But mostly, they had watched each other, circling around a precarious common point between them. 

And now they had shattered it, through the drift, and Adam’s veins shivered at the _reality_ of a touch amidst the silence after a neural connection.

“Are they deep?” Adam asked, inconsequential, realising belatedly that he had been silent for too long. 

Long enough that Ronan had traced two fingers all the way to the top of Adam’s spine — where the connectors must have left something like a bruise because it felt swollen — and then skittered off Adam’s shoulders.

Ronan lifted his hand up, at the question, right in Adam’s field of vision. 

“Bloody.”

With his fingers red, it was both a statement and a curse. 

Averting his eyes from Ronan’s hand, Adam found Ronan staring back at him — eyes blue and deep in the handsome frame of his dark eyebrows. Neither of them averted their gaze.

Ronan brought the fingers to his mouth.

Adam's body moved before his mind could catch up, spinning around and grasping the collar of Ronan’s shirt.

Somehow they both gasped, spiralling off track in unison — as if instincts had reinstated a synchronicity they had only just sampled. Ronan’s back slammed against the wall once, and then twice, when Ronan instinctively countered Adam and Adam jerked him around even more firmly. 

The purposefulness of his own gestures was foreign to Adam himself — his thoughts still stuck on the faint smear of blood on Ronan’s lips, and how it got there. But he still kept Ronan pinned, with one arm pressed across his chest, even more so because Ronan was pushing back against him. 

It would be so easy, to turn this turmoil into a fight. But Adam didn’t feel like fighting. 

When he finally dragged his eyes away from Ronan’s mouth, Ronan was looking at him, unfocused. So close. There was strain in his whole body, palpable, but he wasn’t channeling it into violence — even though Adam had started this.

“I feel them, in my mind,” Ronan breathed out, barely a murmur. “I feel all the places you left behind.”

In the cage of his ribs, Adam’s heart stuttered. And stuttered. It was like a heart attack that never stopped.

He surged forward and kissed Ronan, right on the lips, right on the blood.

The pressure was dry, his lips almost chapped, and Ronan was warm and _physical_ , a merciless contrast against the convolutions of Adam’s thoughts. 

Adam made to pull back, overwhelmed. It was Ronan who chased him, straining against the pressure of Adam’s forearm. 

“Adam…”

They kissed again, their heads tilting to deepen the contact. The darkness behind Adam’s closed eyelids sparked with a phantom heat, flaming every time Ronan’s breath mingled with his own. Again, and again. The inside of Ronan’s lower lip was warmer, soft, so Adam caught it in his mouth, between his teeth — once, just to try, a second time because he liked it. Ronan bit back. 

Adam’s forearm dropped away from Ronan’s chest, but he grasped onto both of Ronan’s shoulders instead. He wouldn’t know what to do, if Ronan were to slide from his grip now. So he dug his fingers down, and dropped his mouth open. Licking inside, because he _had to_.

They had piloted a weapon of mass destruction together, in perfect synch, and yet they fumbled with kissing. Teeth clattering, noses brushing, the contact too strong at times, too feeble at others. Their breaths shook out of synch, against each other’s mouth.

Adam felt it, and felt it, and yearned for it _desperately_. 

He ran his hands down Ronan’s arms, blindly following of the shape of his muscles — shoulders to biceps to elbows and down — as if getting a feeling for him outside of their merged minds could make up for the missing neural connection. Ronan let him, even though he felt always on the verge of lashing back. The subtle thrill of danger tingled over the roof of Adam’s mouth, just as the tip of Ronan’s tongue slid along it. 

“Ronan…” 

Adam tightened his hands around Ronan’s wrists. Under his touch, the scars of years and years of drifting were just a slight bump of smoother skin. 

Ronan tilted his head on the other side and kissed Adam with heightened intensity.

They kissed deeply — persistently. 

At every hitch of their breaths, It was easier to match than it had been since they had stepped out of the Jaeger. A razor-sharp line separated peacefulness from fervency, and they kept tumbling back and forth. Adam would be contented of Ronan’s pulse under his hands, and then the drying spit on his lips would send a shiver down his spine and it wouldn’t suffice anymore. One of them discovered a particularly nice angle and they would chase the contact to the breaking point, but then they would get distracted by the closeness and the slow brush of their noses together.

Adam had never kissed anyone like this — like they wanted to be in each other minds and this was the only possible decoy.

The delirious thought of kissing Ronan in the drift sent a shiver of distilled _want_ down Adam’s spine. 

Was it possible? Would Ronan _let him_?

He pressed Ronan’s wrists against the wall and caged him even more — a very different strain from that of sparring. 

Ronan sagged more heavily against the wall, rather than fighting Adam off him — he could, with his impossible build, but he _wouldn’t_. Knowing it in such a fundamental way made Adam’s head spin. That, and the fact that Ronan sliding two centimeters lower matched their mouths even nicer. Adam tilted his head from one side to the other — wet and open mouthed — and put the opportunity to good use. 

There was a low rumbling groan, and Ronan pressed a leg between Adam’s thighs just to drag their bodies into full contact without having to struggle to free his hands. 

Chest against chest and legs against legs, Adam rocked on his feet a bit. He had only wanted to reassess the position, but they ended up dragging against each other. A collection of disjointed sensations hit Adam like a trainwreck — he was half-naked and sore and Ronan was impossibly solid to lean against, and he had a whole _body_ rather than just a mind, two blue eyes and a warm mouth. 

He was hard against Ronan’s leg, but Ronan was hard too.

Adam’s eyes blinked open in a disoriented flash of light, spotted as if he had just faced an explosion. 

“Shit…” Ronan panted, kissing Adam’s lower lip, and then the corner of his mouth, and then his cheek. “Fuck.”

They were too close for Adam to get anything more than an impression of Ronan — dark buzz-cut hair, a frown on his forehead, his eyes fluttering, not quite shut. Every gasp of uneven breath made Adam’s nerves spark, from his skin throughout his body.

“I know,” Adam gritted out, tilting his head upwards when Ronan nosed at the line of his chin.

“Do you?” The question was challenging but the kisses that moved to the line of Adam’s neck were tentative. 

“I _know_.” Adam rocked their bodies together, again, as if there was any chance either of them was not aware yet of how they were snapping. 

“Then let me go.” A low murmur, so alluring, fluttering on the soft skin behind Adam’s ear — the left one. 

If Ronan was this close he must be able to see the wiring of the implant, but it didn’t matter. There were no secrets, for him. Regardless of the demand, his wrists stayed firmly on the wall where Adam was still pressing them. 

“No.”

The response was firm but Adam shivered at Ronan’s mouth dropping open and sucking a mark on his neck in reproach.

“Let me go,” Ronan insisted. “I need to touch you.”

“I know,” Adam confirmed, letting his full weight plaster Ronan even more firmly against the wall. 

A light kiss on the shell of his ear — Adam owed the Corps for the ability of hearing Ronan panting against it. Then Ronan’s head dropped on Adam’s shoulder and he nibbled down the line of Adam’s collarbone. With his head still tilted, Adam stared at the unfamiliar ceiling with a shivering breath — then with a hiss, when Ronan’s mouth traced a sore swollen spot where the connector had been latched on. He kept at it until Adam cracked in half with a moan, rubbing their bodies together with little leverage. 

“Adam.” It was low and _personal_ , right on his skin. “Let me go.”

“No.”

“So I can’t touch you?”

“Of course you can.” 

Ronan laughed — and then keened a bit when Adam’s thighs pressed forward, increasing the contact. Both sounds echoed through Adam’s brain, surreal in their heat.

“You’re fucking _impossible_.” He said to Adam, emphatic.

It didn’t sound like an insult, with the laughter still lingering and Ronan’s cheek pressed against Adam’s shoulder, prickling with stubble. It made Adam even less likely to let go — irrationally scared that they would meander away from this wall and apart from each other, and lose this feeble connection that was already ten times less visceral than the drift. 

“An impossible asshole” Ronan whispered it like a term of endearment. 

His mouth kissed downwards, along Adam’s chest, skipping from one connector mark to the next. There was a maddening slow slide of tongue on Adam’s right nipple that made Adam reassess in his stance reflexively, and Ronan just used it as a clue to slide even further down. 

Adam hadn’t let go of Ronan’s wrists, but with his back pressed on the wall Ronan was sagging downwards — and downwards — leaving his hands where Adam had pinned them on the wall. It was like watching him find a way out of a deadlock in the training room — and _it wasn’t_. 

Ronan’s mouth dropped open along Adam’s abdominal muscles, following the spasm of them with his tongue. It felt like pure instinct, a move you make with what you’re given.

“Fucking hell,” Adam swore. 

“I know,” Ronan echoed him, a mockery strained by his laboured breath on Adam’s skin. 

Dragged down by his own weight, Ronan kneeled on the floor at Adam’s feet. With his arms stretched upwards and his back on the wall Adam was still caging him against, he should have looked silly. But he was kissing along Adam’s stomach, moving towards the connector that clamped the bottom part of the suit up — and silly was very far away from Adam’s mind. 

Ronan’s mouth opened wide — red, well-kissed lips that made Adam’s cock _twitch_ — but when he closed it back it was all teeth clattering against the composite material of the connector. He had told Adam he could bite them off, but Adam hadn’t quite believed him. Now he did, feeling the burn of the connector releasing from his body, and the suit whistling loose — away from the top of Adam’s right leg.

Dropping his forehead on the wall, Adam looked down at Ronan, disbelieving towards this impossible being that kneeled at his feet and let Adam pin him against a wall. With a perfunctory movement, Ronan dug his teeth into the side of the connector at Adam’s left side, and let the suit unravel down past Adam’s knees. 

The shimmering fabric dotted with connectors fell to the floor, top and bottom alike, as disjointed as it had been when the system of the preparation room had spread it to put it on Adam. The connectors at his feet were still in place, but Adam ignored them completely in favour of the picture that Ronan painted — kneeling in ill-fitting clothes in front of Adam’s nakedness. 

There was a peculiar type of stillness in the both of them, an evidently crossed line that was of a different nature from drifting, piloting — not a duty, but another necessity. 

Ronan leaned forward and brushed another kiss on Adam’s stomach, almost chaste in plain contrast with the obscenity of the whole situation. Adam’s cock brushed at the side of Ronan’s face, in the process, and Adam groaned under his breath, feeling shameless and blatant.

“I used to watch you, in the hangars.” Ronan murmured, leaving his forehead against Adam’s abdominal muscles and looking away from him. Skin against skin, with his arms still lifted high, it sounded like a confession. “Way before the training rooms, I used to watch you.”

Adam felt his muscles spasm under the pressure of Ronan’s head, and pressed Ronan’s wrists more firmly against the wall in retaliation of the storm Ronan was stirring inside him. “You were always on display for everyone to see. I think I watched you _more_.”

There was a shivering sigh with barely any sound, like a bird anxious to take flight from the nest, and Ronan’s hands closed in a fist instead of shaking. Maybe they were both holding onto themselves in some place delicate.

Adam didn’t know what to do with the curve of Ronan’s nape — exposed for Adam to see from above and full of dark scars that overlapped like the claws of a crow — except wanting to hold onto Ronan _forever_.

It was Ronan who broke the stillness, lifting his head from where it had warmed Adam’s skin and sitting squarely on his heels. He dropped his mouth open and took Adam’s cock inside with barely any sound, outrageously unceremonious.

The progress had felt so slow for Adam, as it was happening, but it came rushing back in a fast-forward — Ronan’s breath, the tongue that Adam had sucked on sliding on the tip of his dick, warm, wet. 

He swore between the clench of his teeth with more passion than he has ever had in his life.

“Hey,” Ronan uttered, sliding off Adam’s cock with the faintest _slick_ of tongue against skin. “That’s part of _my_ greatest hits.”

Adam realised belatedly that he had never used to curse to the tune of _Jesus Mary shitshow of a fuckery_ before. It made him snicker, just a bit — stroking his thumbs over the veins of Ronan’s wrists, after having plucked knowledge from his brain. “Yup, thanks for the prompt.”

Some tension released off Ronan’s shoulders, and he was still laughing when he sucked Adam back in. 

It was still very much worth swearing for. 

With his hands still pinned on the wall, exactly where Adam had put them and kept pressing them, Ronan’s body was a long, tantalising line of raw power happily laid at Adam’s feet. His elbows jutted towards Adam, his skin fair enough to show the lines of his veins — but even more so, to show the line of the drifting scars, etched in. Every rippling muscle, clothed or exposed, conveyed an unmistakable message — _this species is deadly._

And yet, with this species exactly, Adam had matched — and they had found themselves in the middle of a common ground of destruction.

Adam hummed under his breath and leaned more heavily against the wall — pressing his forehead on it to look down at Ronan, caging him and being his prisoner at the same time. He loosened his grip, guiding Ronan's wrists to overlap so that he could keep them both in place with one hand.

It wasn’t much, and Ronan could snatch his hands away at any given second — but instead he kept the backs of his hands squarely on the wall, and just twined his fingers with Adam’s. He gave out a little sigh, and Adam felt it ricocheting from his cock all the way throughout his body.

None of this was skill, from either of them — but Ronan was hot and _eager_ , and Adam never yearned for anything as much as he yearned for _him_.

With his left hand free, Adam reached over and caressed along Ronan’s buzz-cut hair, all the way across his head. It was surprisingly soft, but it still tingled all the way through Adam’s palm. Ronan followed the touch, and canted his head backwards — just a bit, caught between the support of Adam’s hand and the one of the wall.

_Just a bit_ was enough for Adam’s cock to inadvertently slip inside Ronan’s mouth _more_. 

Maybe it was the angle, maybe the closeness, but the next thing Adam was aware of — the only thing he could focus on, obsessively — was the tip of his cock jutting on the roof of Ronan’s mouth and the wet touch of Ronan’s tongue flat against the side of his erection. 

He gave a strangled moan, one it was difficult to be embarrassed of considering that Ronan hitched a choked but enthusiastic sound and Adam felt him shivering under his hand. 

“Ronan, fuck…” 

The whisper won Adam a full, shameless sucking — graceless and wet and with a hint of teeth to cut the edge of it. It was so _Ronan_ it made Adam’s eyes cross.

“ _Fuck_!”

Maybe he should have considered sex sooner. He should have considered it immediately — at the first step out of the training ring, at the first second disengaged from the drift. Nothing of this put Ronan back inside Adam’s mind — which was a shame and a frustration — but it made his blood _boil_ , finally charging back up at the right rhythm.

Adam canted forward on his feet before realising it, the warmth of Ronan’s mouth spreading from his cock all the way to the very core of Adam. Ronan took it with a small muffled sound, which turned slick and obscene when Adam got a hold of himself and straightened back where he started. 

He ran another caress all the way to Ronan’s nape, catching on the scars and tracing them — as delicately as he could muster — in a sort of non-verbal apology for the mishap. But far from being cross, Ronan just tightened the grip of their hands and dropped his mouth more open. 

The roar of blood in Adam’s ears was as loud as his heaving breaths — he had lost it in battle, and now he was losing it again, confronted with Ronan’s approach to intimacy, evidently as uncompromising as Ronan’s _everything_.

After that, it was a bit of a blur made of subtle movements and too-intense sensations. And every time either of them grew a bit more used — a bit more confident — with the current rhythm and arrangement, Ronan would toppled it further off track, in a constant escalation in unknown territories. 

Adam ended up moaning every other breath, forsaking his grip on Ronan’s hands at last just to sneak a hand in the collar of his shirt and grasp on Ronan’s shoulders. The trace of the scars under his touch was more intense than Adam had forseen.

Far from sneaking away from him, Ronan circled his arms around Adam — one on his waist, the other on his leg — and dragged him impossibly _closer_. The next suck engulfed almost the full length of Adam’s cock — it was _mental_.

Adam shivered with the pleasure of it, shutting his eyes tight. He wanted it desperately enough to be willing to _let go_ for it — and at the same time he couldn’t stand for it to be over. 

He scrambled to get hold of the wall and straightened himself back up, with one hand still on Ronan’s head. Seeing his cock slide out of Ronan’s mouth, wet with spit and maddeningly hard, was almost _worse_ than just letting him keep sucking it. 

“Come on…” Ronan complained with a strained, almost disoriented voice, trying to pull Adam closer again. Adam just reached blindly to get Ronan’s hand off his waist so he could get some mobility, and Ronan protested again. “Adam…”

“God, shut up,” Adam hissed, with more heat than actual edge, and let himself fall on the floor with Ronan. “You’re too dressed.” 

Ronan was a whole lot of things _too many_. Too handsome, too eager, too good, too far away, too close. And definitely too much for Adam to convey in words. 

With his breath still on edge and sweat threatening every bend of his body, Adam dragged Ronan away from the wall and closer to him, in a messy grip on the floor. When Adam kissed him, Ronan seemed to lose the demand of being able to keep going with what he was doing and reciprocated with equal ardor. 

Adam tried to separate every once in a while, but facing Ronan like this was overwhelming — flushed and with lips slightly swollen from the strain of sucking on Adam, blue eyes all too bright and a wild, unbidden expression asking for more. So he just kissed him again, and again, using every ounce of presence of mind to strip him in the meantime. 

“Am I naked enough?” Ronan hissed, kicking off the ill-fitting trousers he had borrowed from the standard equipment of the room and crowding against Adam again. “Because I swear to God I’m going to fucking crush you if you…”

Adam didn’t get to hear what he should do to get into a naked, horny fistfight with Ronan — for all the twisted allure the picture had — because he grasped Ronan’s dick and Ronan’s already strained voice broke into a loud moan. 

“If I?” Adam prompted, with a wicked grin and some slow strokes. 

Ronan looked down at himself, in the grasp of Adam’s hand, mesmerised by the view as if it were unthinkable that the guy he had just blowed deep and hard could jerk him off. Adam tightened his grip and gave him a bit of a harder pull — a bit dry on the silken skin — just to hear Ronan whimper for him. To his fascination, when Adam spread the fingers of his free hand along Ronan’s jaw and tilted his chin up, Ronan complied easily. The artificial lighting and too-uniform colour of the walls in the room gave a outworldly tone to Ronan’s complexion, and highlighted the patches of blushed skin in a way that did nothing to hide the eagerness. 

Adam kissed him fleetingly on the lips — just because he could, and there was no reason to stop. The seconds of silence made clear that no reply to his question was coming, so he asked again, rhetorical, “So no crushing me this evening?”

“Fuck you,” Ronan gritted in half a moan, and pushed Adam back to climb on him, on the floor like misbehaving kids. 

“I’m working on it,” Adam countered, and kissed Ronan again, still holding his face in the span of two fingers.

It was deeper, this time. Long, wet, wanting.

Adam kept stroking teasingly along Ronan’s hardness, his thumb and at times his index skipping along the tip, feeling up what he couldn’t currently see. Ronan fit nicely in his hand and was very satisfactory to touch, with his foreskin uncut and dragging on the increasing wetness with every pull. 

“Quit it,” Ronan gasped, barely pulling out from their kiss. He clawed at Adam’s forearm, not quite pulling his hand away. His breath wavered between relief and unsatisfied frustration when Adam moved his fingers away from the tip and rubbed him a bit at the base. 

“I like how it feels...that you’re uncut.” Adam murmured, tilting Ronan’s head to the side to kiss along his neck. 

Ronan went easily, fully bending on the side, but bit Adam’s shoulder in the process. “I fucking figured.”

Adam smirked, letting go of Ronan’s jaw to circle his shoulders. “You like it, too,” he whispered him, sliding one fingertip at the slit of Ronan’s cock, hot and slippery. 

Ronan groaned with his face in the crook of Adam’s neck — far from denying the obvious. There was a slight quivering in his body, exacerbated by the precarious straddling and the cold floor. He raked his fingers along Adam’s back, nails first, and sucked on a point on Adam’s neck that had no business being this sensitive.

It did _things_ to Adam, having Ronan so close, so warm, sharing pleasure.

“Would you let me do something?” Adam asked, biting on the shell of Ronan’s ear while he kept stroking Ronan’s cock — slow and steady.

“I’d let you do anything,” Ronan whispered, immediate enough to make Adam’s cock twitch beside his own wrists, between their bodies.

Adam’s heart did something funny in his chest — expanding wide enough to press insistently on his ribs and then collapsing on itself. Heartbreak was familiar, a chronic pain numbed by habit for a child unwanted, unloved. This — this was something else.

“Don’t say it,” Adam told him, equally low, even while leaving a small trail of nuzzling kisses along Ronan’s head until Ronan lifted up. “I want so many things.”

It was a weird confession, charged with much more than Adam was able to express in words. Once again, and just as desperately, he wished to have Ronan back with him in the drift — terrifying but freeing in its unbidden honesty. As it was, Adam could only kiss him, which was easier than looking at him, with the weight of Ronan on his legs and the private bubble of shared heat of their bodies. And with the slow caress of Ronan’s tongue against his own, getting what he wanted seemed almost _feasible_.

“You’re very…” Adam gasped, after a while, emerging almost disoriented from Ronan’s kissing him. “...very distracting.”

The shit-eating grin that spread in reply was distracting as well, on Ronan’s wet lips. “Years of practice.”

Adam’s eyes fluttered as Ronan raked a hand through his hair and went back at kissing along his skin. “More like you’re a natural.”

“You’re mocking my commitment and I’m _deeply_ hurt.” The exaggerated mumbling came as Ronan’s head lowered, following again — and more thoroughly — the connector’s mark on Adam’s chest. 

Adam had never been aware of someone else’s teeth as he was aware of _Ronan’s_.

He groaned, missing the beat of their bickering, and circled Ronan’s back with one arm while reaching for to the wall. That, too, was accidentally distracting, with Ronan pressing more against him and their cocks sliding against each other. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” Adam swore in a hiss, as Ronan catapulted himself in the new arrangement in the straddle of Adam’s lap as quickly as he decided on a new hit on the Jaeger. An unstoppable force, currently focused on taking hold of both of their dicks _together_. “I like that.”

Ronan hummed, like the purr of a panther half-draped against Adam’s chest, and Adam could not refrain from kissing his neck even while he looked over his shoulders. He slammed a hand on one of the side sockets of the laminal washer, unlocking a little in-built drawer.

“Parrish,” Ronan rumbled, too taken with rocking against Adam and trying to stroke two cocks at the same time to really paying attention. “The fuck are you doing, get your hands back here.”

It was almost difficult to talk with the building pressure of his own heartbeat against his chest, and Ronan had a strong, wide grip that would make anyone speechless. But at least Adam didn’t get the wrong drawer, and the flimsy packaging of thin film was all too easy to break. The resulting mess on Adam’s right hand was a perfect match for his needs.

“You said I could try,” he argued, weakly, and dug the fingers of his left hand at the top of Ronan’s thigh. With Ronan perched on his knees, the whole line from his knees to his buttocks was a tense line of muscle — Adam’s treacherous mind sparked with the thought of grasping it hard enough to leave _bruises_. 

“What?”

Adam slid his right hand down the crack of Ronan’s ass, slick with a cream that definitely wasn’t provided for this purpose — but the contact was slippery, _promising_.

Ronan’s breath caught and he stilled, a low tremble propagating all the way up to his shoulders. Under Adam’s lips, the vein on his neck thrummed with a furious pulse, and it would have been easy to suspect that this was _too much_ , if Ronan’s dick didn’t jumped at the contact.

“Ronan?” Adam whispered, keeping the contact still and trying to gauge Ronan’s tension. 

With a low, wavering sigh, Ronan canted against Adam’s chest, as if shaking away the tension. He shivered when the movement rubbed Adam’s hand against him — a little moan cracking at the end of it. The hand buried in Adam’s hair felt possessive, holding onto him and refusing to let Adam slip away. 

“Do it,” Ronan urged him, when Adam stroked the flat of his wet fingers against him, once again and more properly. “Do it, do it, _do_...Ah!”

Adam’s middle finger caught at the rim and he thrust it in to the second knuckle. 

Ronan’s head leaned against Adam’s, cheek against temple, and Adam could feel him clenching his jaw even though the contact was too wet to really hurt in any way. With his wrist at the top of Ronan’s ass, Adam tensed his hand a little more and pushed the finger all the way in. It was a peculiar sensation, ten times more intimate than playing with the tip of Ronan’s cock. Adam wanted to just marvel at it and escalate the contact at the same, impossible time. Caught in the middle, he just slid his finger in, and out, and back in, easy and wet. Just beside his ear, Ronan hummed a little _Mhn_ and clenched.

“Say something,” Adam said, and it was unfair because he knew — just like that — that this was not something Ronan could shit-talk over.

He turned his head to look for Ronan’s lips, as if to soften the request, and Ronan kissed him with an endearing unselfconsciousness before murmuring, “Make me.”

A flare of warmth ran all along Adam’s spine, straight to his dick and then back up along his abs. He slid one finger out and came back with two, the stretch of it eased by the effect of surprise. 

Ronan made an incoherent sound and pushed Adam back, all the way to the floor. 

The sight of him straddling Adam’s hips, naked and aroused, didn’t help. The little ripple of muscles when the movement lodged Adam’s fingers all the way inside him didn’t help. The way Ronan kept hold of both of their cocks, even while too distracted to do anything about it, didn’t help. But with Ronan’s elbow dropping on the floor beside Adam’s head, breathing hard, Adam wasn’t quite sure he wanted to _help it_.

Flopped on top of him, Ronan buckled when Adam adjusted his arms and moved his fingers more properly — in and out and taking any little twitch of Ronan’s hips as a guide of how to do it better. Ronan’s body shadowed the light, crowding over Adam, but he seemed too unfocused to even think about a kiss. A little frown creased his forehead and then he moved his hand again — a full stroke on both their cocks, cramped between the press of both their bodies. 

Adam’s head touched the floor with a thud and he moaned — harder and more riled up than he had ever been. He retaliated by bending his fingers deep inside Ronan just as he felt him clenching, prompting a body-wide shiver. They both swore, and even the tune of it felt similar. 

“Have you done this before?” Adam asked, chasing a greedy thought in his mind — even more desperate as he figured that he didn’t know, _he didn’t know_ , and Ronan felt so close but still too far away.

Ronan swallowed, deep. “Sometimes, alone,” he looked down at Adam, uncharacteristically overwhelmed by just _saying it_. “It’s not the same.”

It was Adam’s turn to have his breath twisting over nothing. “That’s kinda hot.”

Ronan dropped his head, too, making their foreheads touch, as he stared at Adam as if he was an impossible puzzle — which was blatantly unfair coming from him. He stroked them both again and somehow it was even more exciting, with the up-close eye contact. “Your drawl when you’re turned on is hot, too,” Ronan confessed.

It made Adam blush for no deeper reason than self-consciousness, but Ronan seemed more interested in kissing him than in drawing this out, and proved even more distractible through fingering. At odd times, the tension became unbearable and Adam buckled up in Ronan’s grip — against Ronan’s cock — trying to get more friction. The day-lighting in the room made everything more obscene, and the cold floor underneath Adam stood little chance against Ronan, whose body was a furnace of naked heat. 

“Another?” Ronan suggested, sliding away from Adam’s mouth to kiss on his shoulder — and casually avoiding to look him in the eyes. The request wasn’t vague at all, considering the clenching around Adam’s fingers.

“Touch the tip?” Adam bargained, retracting his hand a bit just to tease the anular at Ronan’s rim — an added bonus.

Ronan groaned, but moved his hand between them and complied. 

The slide of his palm was maddening enough for Adam, making him swear under his breath, but made Ronan bit down on his own lower lip, trying very hard not to jump away. Adam felt the strain against his fingers even through the slickness, and a wet little spot where Ronan’s hardness nudged against his. He held Ronan steadier, with an increased grip on the top of Ronan’s thigh, and turned his fingers _just so_. They slid in past the second knuckle and Ronan’s body wide shiver made Adam’s cock twitch in sympathy. 

“Too much?”

Ronan shook his head and canted back against Adam’s hand, fucking himself even more on it.

_Never too much_ was an unsurprising policy, for Ronan Lynch. The fact that it came with a penchant for kissing all the way through it was something Adam was more than willing to indulge in. It was easier, too, to get better at it by virtue of repetition in such a short period of time. 

Adam let his eyelids drop and pushed up against Ronan’s grip, against his weight. He felt _so close_.

“Parrish...”

With his eyes still closed, Adam just turned and kissed Ronan’s face blindly, assuming it as the request. Ronan could not be this far either, not with the little moans filtering through his heavy breath. 

“Adam?” 

“Mhn?” Adam stopped in his track to nibble at Ronan’s lips, at the renewed call. 

“Put it in?” 

The slight interrogative tone and the reflexive clench of Ronan’s body around his fingers at just _the thought_ of it hit Adam harder than the _substance_ of the request, if possible.

“ _Goddamnyou_ ,” Adam cursed him, taking that bite belatedly just to stress the point. “Ronan, I’m too close…”

“I’m close too, I’m close, come on,” Ronan insisted, too close to be in perfect focus for Adam’s vision, but still evidently flushed — almost frenzied, after toppling over the edge of asking for it. “I never tried, I want it.”

Yet another confession shooting right to Adam’s cock. 

“You’re _impossible_ ,” Adam echoed what had been Ronan’s previous complaint back at him, and swatted Ronan’s hand away from its grip on their cocks.

“You started it!” Ronan pointed out, as if it made any sense.

He still had the nerve of looking surprised when Adam pushed himself back to sitting and slid his fingers away from it. Adam guided him back to his knees, with their chests even closer than before.

“You didn’t even ask nicely.” It was an pointless grumbling, mostly coming from the fact that Adam felt _embarrassingly_ close to coming — too close to play this game, really. 

Still, he reached blindly for his cock between Ronan’s spread legs and gritted his teeth at he guided it to flicker between Ronan’s cheeks. After all this effort, Ronan looked finally, suddenly, speechless — and very careful in bringing his arms around Adam’s shoulder.

“Don’t go and get all tense now,” Adam whispered, hugging him back. 

Then, just as it Ronan was distracted in trying to form a reply to the teasing, he pushed Ronan down with the arm around his waist.

Ronan was open and slick from Adam’s fingers, and spread by Adam’s hand, now. Sliding the tip in was almost effortless. Then Adam bucked up before he could let himself _feel it_ — and he was half away inside. Ronan made a quizzical expression, not even breathing, and sat down the rest of the way before either of them could think better of it.

They moaned in a nice synch — one that would make Adam smile in another occasion. 

Not now, though. 

Now, Adam was too distracted by the tight heat engulfing him, and the weight of Ronan’s body literally grounding him. He wanted to kissed Ronan, but he was too distracted watching him, listening to him. 

They breathed in, and out, and it wasn’t perfectly paired but it was _almost there_ in a way that made Adam’s heart soar in excitement. 

He didn’t know which one of them moved first, who pushed up and who pulled down, but Adam’s cock thrust in and out of Ronan — slower than his fingers had but _deeper_ — and Adam was sure he would never be as intimate with anyone else in the word.

He didn’t have words for it, as his heart clenched weirdly in his chest again, and soon enough he didn’t have coherent thoughts, either. 

It was short and glorious.

Ronan moaned with his nails digging in Adam’s shoulders and his knees clenched at Adam’s sides as he shook through his orgasm. He squirmed up mindlessly, as if dragged by the sensation, but Adam kept him close and back on his cock.

“Ah! _Fuck_!”

Ronan’s cock gave a twitch through the wetness on Adam’s chest, too eager. Adam kissed him, and rocked blindly against him, coming in the clech of his body.

It took a while, to stop feeling it — to stop squirming against each other in an echo of sensation. The frustrated edge that had grappled at them both after disengaging the drift seemed to diffuse with the same little shivers, one messy slide of tongue after the other. They had took too long to get to this point, and now any winding down was too fast. 

When Adam finally surrendered and slid out, Ronan stumbled, a bit uncoordinated, to put his back against the wall but kept holding onto Adam’s hand. It was very alluring, to see him this out of breath. It wasn’t usual, to exert Colonel Lynch.

“I kind of want another shower,” Ronan confessed, half-spaced out.

“More like you need one,” Adam countered. If there wasn’t any word good enough this would have to suffice. “Some sleep, too,” he added.

“You’re gonna have to drag me up,” Ronan declared, closing his eyes with the back of his head against the wall. He had kiss marks, and come, and sweat all over his body — filthy, handsome, and everything Adam had ever wanted.

There were some long second of silence, in the too-wide room echoing with their breaths.

“I’ll fuck you properly, on a bed,” Adam said, suddenly. 

Ronan shivered in a little arch, hypersensitive even for the way it _sounded_. It took a second, but he smiled, and then laughed — an elated sound too close to a giggle. “Buy me a fucking dinner first, Parrish, I swear.”

In the end, it was easy as that — the same push and pull, but more intimate. The same people that had dragged each other through the training ring, but more _known_. It should had been terrifying, but it was already there, already _done_.

Dressed again in odd clothes, they chugged down some random energy snacks with an insane amount of water. Bringing their piloting uniform with them, they found a closed room where they could force the night-mode for the lighting and share the same cramped mattress. 

They slept through the rest of the day, and then the night, waking up a couple of times for odd spans of fifteen minutes interspersed with kissing, before one of them was lulled back to sleep and dragged the other with him. 

Ronan’s breathing seemed to have yet another rhythm if he slept against Adam’s shoulder. Adam collected that, too, filing it deep enough in his mind that only Ronan would ever catch it — only in the drift. 

With his hand tracing over the scars on Ronan’s back, Adam slept deeply and dreamlessly, feeling very warm.

  
  


* * *

  
  


They docked before dawn, more than twenty four hours after when they had left.

The cargo ships were definitely too big to enter the inner pier, and that left them on an outer embankment swept by wind and salt as the clocks on their pagers struck 06:30 am. Both Gansey and Henry had surrendered the jacket of their uniform to Blue — who was prone to getting cold and grumpy, as they waited for Team Greywaren to join them.

“They’re late, was there something wrong up there?” Henry seemed more disgruntled by how flat his hair was looking — black and a bit too long, flopping down with the unflattering effect of two nights on a ship and a day on a Jaeger. 

“No, I asked for a general report to the Captain, their sail was just as uneventful,” Gansey replied, staring at the forbidding metal of the ship body. Greywaren was not immediately visible to the eye, hidden in the locked hangars that made up most of the available space. 

“Maybe Adam tossed Lynch starboard and now he’s trying to explain the officiers why we’re missing a Colonel,” Blue suggested, looking younger than she was in three jackets over her lean body.

Despite the weight of Gansey’s seriousness, he laughed at the mental picture — kind of difficult to dismiss as implausible considering how he saw them fighting against each other. But then he saw them fighting _together_. 

“I don’t think he would — they just drifted.” Gansey repeated for what felt the uptenth time in a handful of hours.

“Yes, we know, we talked about it.” Henry said, indulgently. 

“And let me just say again that I don’t find so outrageous that someone other than _‘a Lynch’_ was able to pilot the Jaeger.” Blue interjected, before Gansey could provide another _I’m just saying_. “They are weapons, they are meant to be used.”

Gansey ran a hand through his hair, with a desperate wish for a real shower and a proper meal. “I’m not outraged, but the use of Dreamcatcher leaves me flabbergasted.”

“Say it again, but three times and faster, and see if we Blue throws _you_ in the water.” Henry suggested, laughing with ease at the wording choice.

“You can eviscerate Lynch until he catches the _flabber_ too, if they could just come the hell down.” Blue’s voice escalated in a mocked call to the ship. 

She inched closer to Henry, and though she was the most covered of them Henry draped over her shoulders easily, to keep her warm. With the difference in height, they looked a bit like two penguins on the Arctic shore. Gansey smiled at himself, feeling a bit warmer at the thought, even though he valued his life and didn’t share it with the class. He could even join in, and that made him warm for a whole other reason.

He didn’t, in the end, because his thoughts kept whirring in the way they always would if he found himself out on mission for too many nights in a row.

It was all too easy, to fall into old patterns — especially the ones cemented through the years. Kaijus had always prefered nighttime for the attacks, in the years ramping up to Doomsday. It was every few months, than every few weeks, then every few days, and the next thing Gansey knew is that he had lost entire seasons in a blur of his destroyed circadian cycles. 

He knew that Blue and Henry were aware of this — through the drift — but that didn’t necessarily mean Gansey wanted to be the centre of that conversation. And they let him be.

Ronan and Adam arrived a couple of minutes later, speeding down the ramp of the docked ship and evidently bickering. 

“It’s faster if I go and check,” Adam was arguing.

“It’s even faster if you fuck off, we brought the Jaegers back plenty of times.” Ronan barked off, waving a hand over to Gansey when he caught sight of him on the pier.

They turned on their steps and walked fast on the concrete to join the three of them. Dressed with some indistinct blue work clothing, evidently borrowed from the cargo ship themselves, they looked like odd twins — one dark, one light. As they kept talking, evidently oblivious to their own movements, Gansey got to witness the way their shadows crossed under two adjacent highlights — one step, after another, after another, in a smooth synched wave. 

Blue glanced up at him, and Gansey knew he must be looking as confusedly emotional as he was feeling, because she smirked. 

“You two took ages, and I’m freezing, what the hell?!” Blue protested immediately when Adam and Ronan got into hearing range.

“Parrish wanted to check Greywaren and the re-entering procedure with the Techs, before.” Ronan’s eyes rolled up to the sky, wiped clean of any star from the neons. 

“And on Raven King too,” Adam added, as if Ronan was purposefully leaving details out to make him look unfair. “I wanted to, if _someone_ could stop stalling me.”

“If everything was fine with one, it’ll be fine with the other,” Ronan kept arguing, but didn’t really raise his voice past the tone he already had.

“You weren’t such a pain in the ass when I wanted to go in the hangar.” Adam frowned, darkly.

“‘Cause that’s our Jaeger, check on it all you want, but past that is paranoia.” Ronan countered, as if delivering the perfect closing hit.

Henry was smirking too, now. When he caught Gansey stared him, the smile tilted sideways, wicked. _Our Jaeger_ , he mouthed for Gansey’s sake.

Our Jaeger indeed.

“Thank you, Adam, but we counterchecked with the team, and honestly at this point is just a case of setting them back to the ramp.” Gansey intervened, prompting a triumphant _aha!_ from Ronan.

Adam seemed to stumble weirdly out of his banter with Ronan, to properly realise that they had company, and that company involved Gansey, Blue and Henry. He looked at them with an overwhelming awkwardness — one it was difficult to discard as a quirk, because the situation was indeed _weird_. 

“I apologise, I didn’t mean to overstep,” Adam admitted, painfully unsure of his role.

“Parrish, man, you just stepped in a _damn Jaeger_ ,” Henry shattered the whole hesitation by addressing exactly the point. “A bit less apologising, a bit more explaining.”

With Blue’s aid, the two of them grabbed one of Adam’s elbows each and dragged him into motion — towards the end of this embarkment and, hopefully, to the service vehicles that would bring them back to the Shatterdome.

Left momentarily behind face to face with Ronan, Gansey sighed deeply, with a little twist in his stomach.

“Did you really just drag him all the way up Greywaren?”

“Yeah, basically…”

“Ronan, what the hell.” Gansey stopped resisting to the urge of running a hand over his face. “That’s a level of reckless excessive even for you.”

“You can drop the fucking patronising for the next time you’re not dying,” Ronan lashed back, immediately feisty. “And it worked. It really...it really fucking worked.”

Leaving his hand drop to brush just at his lower lips, Gansey stared at Ronan and at his hesitation. “You certainly piloted. How was it?”

It was almost unfair to ask it, one pilot to another, because Gansey would not be able to answer the same question for the first time he drifted with Helen nor the first time he drifted with Blue and Henry. It was _everything_ , and that much was clear to them both. 

But what of the rest?

“Hellish,” Ronan admitted, suddenly. His eyes were averted, aimlessly, as Adam’s voice distanced together with Blue and Henry’s. “And kind of fucking awesome. I...I don’t know, Gansey, it _worked._ ”

“I saw. I didn’t expected it.”

“Fuck if I did.”

There was more than just words in the little exchange of murmurs, more even than the blatant relief of having Gansey in one piece after the attack — or the still-undiscussed knowledge that whatever had gotten Niall could have easily stuck Gansey’s down today, too. 

A pilot is only a pilot on a Jaeger. And someone ended up stepping properly in a spot that had always sported Niall’s name, and Niall’s name only. 

The self-consciousness of the fact was evident on Ronan’s face, so Gansey let him a bit off the hook and started to walk to close their distance with Blue, Henry and Adam. Random words from them got distorted by the wind, unintelligible, and Adam was probably getting lured into an explanation of some sort — a thin line of tension melting away as Henry and Blue kept dragging him.

“I evoked critical protocol, to do this,” Ronan confessed, looking down on the concrete. “I think General Mother and Dr Jekyll will want me hung in the operation hall.”

Gansey rolled his eyes at Ronan’s usual nicknames for General Astrid Gansey and his own brother, but he couldn’t help by thinning his lips at the mention of the military arm-wrestle that Ronan had unleashed. “Did I mention that you’re goddamn _mental_ , Lynch? Ever?” 

“Once or twice, but you’re welcome, whatever.”

“I’m grateful that you were there, really. You two were spectacular,” Gansey admitted, feeling too much like a scolding aunt for his own taste. “Show them the black-box of the operation from the Jaeger’s record, and I think the last thing they’ll want will be to kill you.”

The pier was ending and Gansey noticed only belatedly that Adam, Blue and Henry had stopped in their track, much closer to the two of them as they had been before.

“You sure about that?” Ronan asked, tilting his chin in the direction of the two vehicles.

The SUV cars were on idle at the start of the embankment, with lights on and the Pan Pacific Defence Corps symbol on every door. It was, admittedly, kind of ominous. 

It became even more so when Astrid and Maura exited the one of the left, quickly followed by Declan and Helen from the one on the right.

Both Gansey and Ronan closed the rest of their distance with the rest of the group much faster. And while Henry and Blue only glanced at Gansey dubiously, there was a surprisingly clean line of panic in Adam’s glance at Ronan. Ronan went and stood close to him, their shoulders almost brushing — but Gansey didn’t have time to focus on that either.

They all fell into attention, under the shared knowledge that General Gansey didn’t often care for strict protocols among the higher ranks — unless the situation called for it.

And possible discussion of inappropriate protocols definitely called for it.

“At rest,” Astrid called, like an afterthought, right when Gansey was reasonably sure she would have kept them in a stiff line to be roasted for at least fifteen minutes.

The plain contrast between lassitude of the logistic arrangement and the tense shadows on everyone’s faces was in no way reassuring.

“We’re glad to have you all back, with the Jaegers,” his mother said, after a long pause in which she surveyed their five-people line and the two cargo ships in the distance. 

The transport procedures of the Jaegers were just beginning with a low clattering chorus of metals and chains and heavy-duty lifters singing into action in the night. 

Gansey glanced quickly to Helen, and even in the disconcerting light of the neons she looked sleepless and overly tense. Considering that the mission had been a success, the sense of dread spread like ice down Gansey’s spine. 

“We’re ready for a detailed mission report at your earliest convenience, ma’am.” Military protocol was always a great backup plan for Gansey’s moments of uncertainty. “And while Greywaren’s rescue was certainly impromptu I’m eager to vouch for the…”

“That will have to wait, Colonel,” Astrid cut through, staring at him with the same eyes Gansey could see every day in the mirror. She waved at Maura, relinquishing her own right to speak.

“We have a critical compromise situation at the HQ, one that could not be pre-debriefed in remote comms.” Maura said, surveying them all once more. 

Gansey glanced quickly at the others even as he nodded stiffly. 

One minute ago, they had all been tired, hungry, cold and ready to wind down the aftermath of the mission at the Shatterdome. Now, they were evidently getting called back into focus, and they all felt the gravity of it, starting to share the thunderous expressions of their welcome committee. 

Critical compromise had never been called twice a day, let alone for something so _internal_ to the gears of the Shatterdome — not that Gansey remembered.

“The core of the Fox Jaeger has been stolen from the containment hangars.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE CLIFFHANGER, PART 1!
> 
> Chapter 5 will be out on **Saturday June 1st**
> 
> You might have noticed that I increased the number of chapters of one, so the next one won't be the last one before the epilogue. The pacing would have been off otherwise, too much content, so I hope you'll stick with me a bit longer!
> 
> For any screaming, you can always refer to [my Tumblr](http://seekthemist.tumblr.com)
> 
> I love each and every one of you reading this, your comments are keeping me alive <33333


	6. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 5 was supposed to be the last before the epilogue, but for pacing reason there will also be a Chapter 6.
> 
> The choice will probably get self-evident by the end, apart from the fact that it's outrageously long as it is.
> 
> Please share some love for Rachel (purrsnicket) because she betas, gives me constant feedback, helps me polishing the delivery and in general keeps me sane <3
> 
> Buckle up for THE PLOTTY PLOT, Family Business©, Relationship feellllls, and much more.
> 
> See you in the end notes~~~

  
  
  


The room was dark, with the usual greenish hue at the corners that characterised the night-mode, but Blue woke up anyway. The sudden lucidity brought a spike of uneasiness in her stomach, her body uncertain as to whether this was just a drill or not. 

When she turned around, Gansey was at her side, exactly where she left him when they called in for rest. The expanse of Henry’s back plastered against her own was familiar, his breath almost tactile on her skin, but Gansey’s all-American profile had yet to lose its novelty. On the other hand, it was immediately clear which one of the two was still awake. 

“Do you ever sleep?” Blue asked in a low murmur. 

“Debatable.” 

Gansey didn’t even turn around to look at her, staring at the ceiling with a taut angle of his neck, nested at the very corner of the pillow. Bringing the two bunk beds of the room together had provided more space for three people to sleep in — albeit for the price of a constant lottery for the person in the spot between the two mattresses — but it was still rare for Gansey to stay the night, the whole night, without taking his leave at some point.

Blue reached over, wiggling her hand and then her whole forearm under Gansey’s neck. He let her, and actually lifted his head up a bit to shuffle at the bend of her elbow — a much better pillow. Only then did Gansey turn around, with a very careful movement, before rubbing his cheek on Blue’s skin and closing his eyes with a sigh — sampling the intimacy rather than resting properly in it.

“We’ve been out a while, you should really sleep a bit,” Blue restated, with a slow caress over Gansey’s left shoulder — naked, a bit bumpy with connectors’ scars.

“I feel like we’re wasting time,” he admitted, but reached over her back, almost distractedly, to leave a hand on her hip. “It was a trap, Jane. It was a trap and we walked right into it.”

For that, Blue did not have a reassuring and sensible answer. 

They had dispatched their main operative Jaeger for a cleanup mission, and something had been waiting for them. Only a surprise recovery from Greywaren had saved the day. And, throughout all this, the Shatterdome had been robbed of their third most prized possession: an unassociated Jaeger core.

The sun had been high in the sky by the time Calla had taken the operative decision to send all the pilots — and pilot-adjacent figures, like Adam — to forced rest. Six hours of nitpicking through maps, footage, and status reports would not have yielded anything that the previous five had not — which was to say, absolutely _nothing_.

Blue’s knowledge of Jaeger mechanics was patchy at best, but every pilot knew that no other machine would stand up against a Mark-III model, by virtue of its self-sustained internal core technology providing both energy and drifting neural framework. She had assumed people like Adam would know more, but the slow shake of Adam’s head at her inquisitive glance had seemed to suggest that precise dynamics were out of reach.

As a consequence, the facts they were left with were scarce, and scattered. 

A Jaeger core had to be properly stored and kept with a low-level external supply charge to not degrade — as such, it was an active material and had to be stored in the safest, most shielded hangar available to the Shatterdome. Hangar #023111 was one of the first installations of the Hong Kong Shatterdome — right after the mechanical ones — and was buried deep in the North side of the Lantau mountain. The natural shielding had been reinforced with five meters of concrete armored with lead, and the blueprints of the insides were a matryoshka of lock-in walls. The site was inherently difficult to access; the core had been brought in by a helicopter — far from inconspicuous — and the procedure had taken several hours. Calla assured them that any movement around this Hangar would have triggered enough alarms to be heard all the way to mainland China.

And yet, everything had stayed perfectly silent, up to the 24h-mark for lock reset and password update. At that point, and that point only, the Headquarter had noticed something missing. 

A single round of the clock for the heist of the century — impossible to achieve and damaging beyond belief. 

“I don’t think anyone is stupid enough to believe that these things are not connected,” Blue uttered. “And I think they would have killed us with the same move, if they could.”

“They killed Niall,” Gansey whispered, low and fragmented by grief, still. 

Knowing him better also meant understanding that. Ronan’s original account — _Noah said I needed to go because they were coming_ — echoed between the two of them, between the lines.

“Jane,” Gansey added, to Blue’s silence, turning his face more fully against the bend of her elbow, almost too warm in the closeness of a bed with three people inside. “Jane, I can’t stand this.” 

“You _are_ standing this,” Blue countered, tucking the arm that was not circling Gansey’s shoulders closer to the space between them, just to comb Gansey’s hair back. “Of course you would stand it even better by sleeping a bit, I mean, but…”

“No, no,” Gansey protested, but did not try to squirm away from the touch. And there was a sentence hanging, not pronounced, that would never appear among copilots — _you don’t understand_. “I...I don’t know how to face this, I don’t know what to do with this. This is not a monster, okay? It’s not, can we just admit it?”

“We can…”

“Brilliant, so it’s not a monster, and I don’t have a great deal of alternatives and I’m left with the evidence that this conflict is human.” Silence lingered between them, as Gansey took a couple of very deep breaths. “I don’t do humans, okay? We didn’t do Doomsday to do _humans_.”

“Oh, you’re such a mess,” Blue whispered, with more affection that she knew what to do with.

She dragged Gansey close, with no resistance on his part. His cheek pressed on her sternum — skin to skin and with her tank top barely in the way — and it felt too intimate, their familiarity with each other impossibly accelerated by the drift. 

“I know, sorry.” There was a certain automatism in the reply, but no distancing, even less so when Gansey breathed deeply in the cocoon of Blue’s arms.

“Would you have avoided Doomsday?” Blue asked, following a weird train of thought. “If someone could have gone there, before, and told you...You’re gonna walk through hell to save the world...and humans still won’t have enough of war. Would you have?”

Gansey tensed, as if taken by surprise by the _what if_. “I…”

Blue waited, but the sound faded into nothing. She sighed. “You can tell me no, you know? A damn valid answer, if you save the world and that only brings assholes barging back from the brink of the apocalypse, then it’s not worth it.”

Skin against skin, Gansey’s eyes shut tight, as he charged up the concept in his head. “Yes,” he breathed out, at the end. “Yes, I would do it again. I would take my Jaeger and go through hell again.” 

It was astounding, how firm his voice could be — self-assured and _kingly_ — as if Blue hadn’t seen him sobbing over what Doomsday entailed, or sounding dismayed at the thought of not being done with the war. 

“That’s very sexy of you, posterboy.” She kissed his hair, just within her reach. 

Gansey chuckled, low and maybe a bit hysterical, but then exhaled long enough that his weight sagged completely in Blue’s arms — trusting.

They stayed like this long enough, breathing in synch, that Blue spaced out in a half-sleep and almost convinced herself that Gansey had slumbered as well, with her hand stroking delicately and holding him against her own chest. 

“I just wish I had a plan,” Gansey confessed, as if anyone in this room could doubt that the chase for an answer would be Gansey’s great obsession. “Something to follow, you know? To know your enemy.”

Blue hummed, noncommittal, feeling very unprepared to offer that kind of practical help — even though Gansey seemed perfectly satisfied with the level of feedback he was getting.

As she mulled over the thought, Henry’s back suddenly left the contact with hers. Another arm came go join the wrap around her waist, doubling up from behind.

“Oh, hey,” she greeted, letting Henry hook his chin over her shoulder.

“You’re a chatterbox,” Henry replied, in lieu of any pleasantries, and stroked along Gansey’s naked back. “Eyes up, Colonel.”

Gansey, who was already lifting his head up, complied with very little effort. “Sorry, we didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You’re lucky you’re both hot, or interrupting my beauty sleep would be punishable by death,” Henry proclaimed, even as he dragged Gansey up from Blue’s chest and kissed him on the lips. “I think we have a date.” 

Blue frowned, perplexed. “You want to go on a date? Now?”

In between of kissing Gansey again, and then once more, Henry waved a personal pager, free of any PPDC logo, between their faces. The screen had a faint backlighting, and short message flashed up onto it.

_Meetup, 22.329 - 114.188._

“I thought you wanted to meet my Mum.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


The date and hour of the meeting arrived separately, hours later, on Blue’s personal pager rather than Henry’s. When they arrived at the coordinates, it was nothing but a dumpling shop in the middle of a busy road in the middle of Hong Kong City.

“We’re positive those were coordinates in standard setting and we didn’t mess anything up?” Gansey asked.

Dressed in a pair of jeans and a cardigan over a cotton t-shirt, Gansey had all the sudden attractiveness of a mundane appearance. Henry had to stop himself from giggling every time he caught Blue staring as if an alien had snatched the original Gansey away and left a poor substitute. The glasses surely did not help, nerdy in a way that seemed to reflect Gansey’s truest essence. The outrageous colouring of the t-shirt — _aquamarine_ , Gansey had insisted — only worsened the situation.

“Fully positive, Colonel Darling, and I wish to put to record that with today’s outfit you have the credibility of a boy scout trying to pull rank,” Henry informed him, looking around like the lost tourist he definitely was not.

“Change of plans, maybe?” Blue suggested, eyeing Gansey carefully — not just because of the outfit, but because they all knew how and why _what about a trap_ was a concept that should never emerge.

“From my mother? That would be Doomsday number two.”

Gansey smiled thinly, idly looking around, without even a cellphone to hold to blend in. “If the families meet she and my Mum would be a blast, then.”

Henry did not have a way to tell him that he was reasonably sure General Gansey and his mother had met already, and if it had been a blast it was a very different kind of _blast_ , because a clattering tuk tuk stopped beside him. 

In a city that spoke English in the background of an extensive Cantonese, the driver addressed Henry in spotless Korean.

“22.329,” the driver rattled off, in a happy and not casual avoidance of the Sino-Korean system.

“114.188,” Henry replied, feeling like a child chanting off a newly acquired knowledge. He turned his head over Blue and Gansey — both with a precarious Mandarin, a more decent Cantonese for the second — who were looking at them quizzically. He winked. “That would be our ride, guys. Get in.” 

The harsh reality of tuk tuks is that, no matter the theoretical occupancy, they never seem to have quite enough space. It was even worse considering Gansey’s bulk and Henry’s height, and they only manage to arrange together in the backseat with Blue draped over both of their legs.

“Careful with your head, B., it’s gonna be bumpy by definition,” Henry warned.

And it very much was, with crazy turns in cramped streets and the crowd somehow sliding around them at their passage. It was a route so convoluted that even Gansey was starting to frown in trying to memorise it. The expression contrasted plainly with his patinated handsomeness in the posters that sometimes looked over them from the side of a skyscraper — sporting either Gansey or Helen in a call for everyone to stick _together, for the future_.

“I’m losing track of where we’re going,” Gansey whispered, tense in his lack of control over this operation.

“It’s okay, I really think we’re in business as usual,” Blue tried to reassure him, winning a lifted eyebrow of educated perplexity.

“We really are, why do you think it took so long to meet?” Henry asked, rhetorical.

More rhetorical than he was actually feeling, because his mother had definitely been avoiding the issue, only to proceed to meet them next door to the Shatterdome.

When they stopped — abruptly enough that they almost projected forward into the driver seat — it was in front of a yet another dumpling shop, just as inconspicuous as the previous one. This time, though, the driver got up and called over to the seller. 

“Double beef and vegetables to take away,” and the word _vegetables_ was in Korean.

The driver got his order immediately and drove off without asking any money of the three of them. They, in turn, were promptly gestured inside, with all the casualness of random tourist clients.

A part of Henry, by this point, was expecting a secret room with enough shielding to stand against the hangars of the HQ, but his mother was just sitting at a large booth table close to the corner of the backroom. 

With her hair neatly collected at her nape, a jacket over a spotlessly-ironed white shirt, and her chopsticks gracefully held — so far away from the tip it should have been impossible to get leverage — Henry’s mother was the picture of old-time Asian businesswoman. Neat but inconspicuous in the great scheme of things, just like the streaks of grey in her deep black hair. 

“Adeunim,” his mother blinked up, spotlessly formal in a vaguely disturbing way, given the setting.

“Eomeonim,” Henry replied humbly, bowing next to the booth. It felt less formal than Gansey standing into attention to General Astrid Gansey, and at the same time more detached — if only for the fact that his mother’s hair was markedly whiter than the last time they had met in person.

Beside him, from Blue and Gansey, there was an echo of “Good afternoon, ma’am,” with two different levels of composure. Seeing them bow was as awkward as always, when someone not raised with the habit did it. 

“Do sit, there is no need for these formalities,” his mother said, waving a hand towards the booth, as if she didn’t just have a very formal greeting with her own son. She spoke with a smooth English that still had a persistent attachment to a slippery Korean accent.

In the obvious setup of a table with four plates prepared, Henry slid to sit next to his mother. It was much better than leaving that spot to Blue or Gansey, even though that placed them on the other side, with nothing to look at but them. 

“Mother, you already know Blue, this is Richard Gansey,” Henry introduced, just because he had to, cutting through titles and full names in all the ways that were wiser in a public setting.

“Of course.” Still keeping her chopsticks at the very end, his mother distributed food around the plates — fuming as if it had been arranged with spotless timing with their arrival. “Blue, you look exactly like you sounded on the phone. Richard, I would never have expected to see you next to my son but, after all, I didn’t plan on seeing you at all.” 

If the occasion had been slightly different, Blue and Gansey’s tense expressions would have been worth a laugh.

“I’m Seondeok,” Henry’s mother added, at their uncertain silence. 

“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mrs Seondeok.” Gansey slammed face-first in his automatic courtesy protocols for nervous moments.

“No Mrs, no Ms, no name and no surnames. It’s just Seondeok, Richard.” 

“Just Gansey,” Henry provided, in a low murmur to the side.

“Just Seondeok, just Gansey,” his mother smiled, thin enough to betray an edge, and thus she must be vaguely entertained by the whole thing. “Eat, I need you occupied while I speak. We have roughly thirty minutes.”

Even with plates arranged with the glory of a Cantonese meal, Blue and Gansey blinked with confusion at the change of pace. Henry prompted them towards the chopsticks, knowing full well that they would not get any more say in the ordeal.

“We’ll make a very long story short, here, by saying that I insisted for my honorable discharge from the PPDC after Manila. Before, I was a member of the implementation team that was working on the Mark-III series...seven years ago.” Seondeok started.

“But the platform…” Gansey dared to interject, but the chopsticks in Henry’s mother hand tapped at the side of the plate, just once. The sound was barely there but it sufficed in stuttering Gansey to an uncertain halt.

“I’m perfectly aware the launching platform was in Sydney at the time, just like I hope you’re aware that the third upgrade was the only one with no prototypes.” She interrupted him back, staring with steady black eyes.

“Yes, there are only three Mark-III,” Gansey murmured, under the impression that a reply was needed. 

Everyone at the table was very much aware of it, starting from Gansey — who saw Glendower through all its upgrades — and ending with Blue and Henry — who only ever touched a member of the Mark-III series with Raven King.

“So the accident is linked to the upgrade?” Blue asked, catching the bait in Seondeok’s steady gaze. 

“Why, what else?” She confessed with ease. “I suppose we have to thank Lynch’s paranoia in his dealings with Artemus, it could have been a complete disaster.”

Looking down at his lap, Henry ran the side of his thumb over his knuckles, more aware of the chair digging in his legs and the tension along his back than he ever wanted to be — even more so in the presence of his mother.

“You never thought to tell me?” Henry whispered, with only his copilots to witness. 

“You would have wanted to know?” his mother replied, rhetorical again.

Henry would not. There was no way of admitting that differently, he just _did not_ — because every time he thought back to the fallout of the Manila Shatterdome he was too young, too scared, too trapped and terrified — and the _why_ was very much inconsequential. 

“But now you’re telling me,” Henry added, after too much silence to be anything but an admission of something close to defeat.

“Now you’ve lost a Third Generation Core, so we have trouble.” Seondeok countered, infuriatingly even in her assessment. 

On the other side of the table, Gansey was very, very still and ignoring the food in a way that didn’t match well with the farce of a family dinner. “That information is classified.”

“Let’s drop the pretense that anything that goes on in the HQ is airtight at 360°, Just Gansey, because it’s part of the problem.” She dug her chopsticks into a piece of food with a hostility that conflicted with all the grace she had displayed so far. “I assure you, my sources are good, frankly discrete ones. I know that you’ve been looking, through your sister. I know that you’ve been looking without making a scene.”

Even with the implied approval of her tone, it did not land completely as a reassurance, if Gansey’s stony expression were anything to go by. Blue glanced at him, and then at Henry, with a layered set of worries in her eyes, but Henry could not offer her anything more than a little headshake. The thinning of Blue’s lips was a terrible sign.

“So you do know what happened? Someone knows what happened? And is Noah Czenry linked to it?” Blue snapped, in a sudden flow. 

“Jane…”

“Don’t _Jane_ me, someone came after us, don’t you want to know who?” 

“Don’t we all,” Seondeok interjected. “There has been a lot of stirring...a lot of worry...since Lynch died. And I want you to understand that the world looks at the Corps...sometimes a bit invasively...because how we live or die depends on you. Do you understand, Just Gansey?”

Gansey had a laser-focused expression that did not allow for a frown, even with fire in his eyes. Henry knew that expression, intimately. It matched with the part of Gansey he had experienced not even three days before — when they had found themselves surrounded, with not enough supplies, cut comms, and Gansey’s mind through the drift had been an avalanche of tactical possibilities to deal with the impossible and _make it out alive_.

“If that’s so…” Gansey considered, with the slightest hint of inhaling, “...would you answer Jane’s questions, please?”

“Very well,” Seondeok said, tossing another serving on their plates because apparently the commitment to the theatre was not in question. 

She raised three fingers, ready to bring them down one at the time. 

“I know what was planned because I was the one planning it. We had been testing what you use now as self-sustained drifting, where neural network and energetics are paired, it was the third test with actual pilots. What I don’t know for sure, even after all these years, is what brought the whole base down. I regret not having been on the Control bridge that night, the events are slippery like quicksilver, and not for my lack of trying.” 

She lowered the ring finger, where the wedding ring of Henry’s father was still present, leaving two up. 

“I don’t think anyone knows, but foul play is on everyone’s mind, the inventory losses are sketchy at best. But it mustn’t be close enough in their minds, if Lynch went down with the element of surprise.” 

With just her index finger up, she glanced at the three of them. 

“Noah Czerny was among the testing pilots for these prototypes. He’s not the only pilot or prospective pilot that we lost, that night seven years ago. We never found the bodies of some of the young recruits, even. Barrington Whelk was with him in the hutch, but Czerny’s the only one that left a signature of an open alert communication that we could find in the systems. No content, just an alert in the void.”

Henry bit the inside of his cheek, sure that if he were to look up Blue and Gansey would be as ashen faced as he felt. “Czerny has been seen, in a hutch, very recently.”

His mother turned to face him, her dark eyes almost palpable on Henry’s cheek. “Not everything brought by the drift is real...but neither is it fake. When I left, I left thinking that we were paying the price of assuming we could sustain an _all or nothing_ kind of game. I can’t tell you what is hiding in the drift.”

“You still left me in the Corps, though,” Henry murmured, before he could help himself.

Seondeok’s dark eyes were staring even deeper holes on Henry's face. “I’ve never been reckless in my life, adeunim, and if monsters were destroying the Earth, a place in L.A. with the people fighting them was your best chance.”

It was difficult to counter, or protest, when Henry was twenty-one years old and had not been in the eye of this cyclone until recently. She had been right, so far, by all accounts.

Under the table, away from the eyes of his mother, Henry felt one of Blue’s legs crossing over his right one from one side, while Gansey’s calf leaned over from the other. It was a weirdly reassuring contact in the middle of a diner. All around them, everyone was too busy chattering and blasting news in Cantonese from television to pay attention to anything they were doing, or saying, at their table. 

“Would you say that what’s hiding in the drift is going to be relevant?” Gansey asked, breaking the uneasy silence that had fallen between them.

“Most likely,” Seondeok said.

“And if you can’t tell us, where do we find the answer? Without alerting half the world of our movements, I mean,” Gansey pressed on, articulated as if they were closing a business deal.

“You found yourself a chaser, son,” Seondeok considered, towards Henry, still looking at Gansey with increased curiosity. “I’m not the only mother whose sleeve you can pull, it’s my understanding that your sister has been plucking information from someone close to one Maura Sargent.” 

Blue blinked up at that, taken by surprise. The layer of interconnection between facts, people, and issues ran deeper and deeper every time Seondeok spoke.

“It’s time to unlock some closed vaults, don’t you think?” his mother asked, to Blue directly, once again rhetorical.

“Then I’ll...ask my sister, I suppose,” Gansey conceded, still wary of the overall approach. “With all due respect, however, this is not nearly enough to extract information from a potentially reluctant subject.”

Seondeok smiled, thinly, “What tells you the someone will be reluctant?”

“My sister is very persuasive.”

The thin smiled opened further in a chuckle, and Seondeok herself seemed taken by surprise by it. It all sounded like a compliment. “And not easily steered away, I suppose.” 

“Not quite, I’m afraid,” Gansey admitted, abandoning his cutlery to reflect on the overall picture, a thumb stroking along his lips. “We have two names from Manila, now. If you have a longer list of the MIA could we have it? And you mentioned problems with inventory, we could need it.”

“That is a lot of intel, Just Gansey. Years of intel.” 

“Meaning that we lost inventories around the world previously?”

Another chuckle, at the increased pace of the back and forth. “Possibly. And of course I don’t have that inventory with me at the moment, and I wouldn’t share all my records with you, Colonel of the Corps. I hope you understand.”

Gansey wrinkled his nose, in a weird concession of a straightforward expression in a moment of Perfect Military Performance. “I understand, of course, and I wouldn’t ask you to jeopardise your position. But I need to be able to hold our ground, and our ground is already slippery.”

Seondeok shifted a bit in her seat, mouthing distractingly the word _our_ and casting a look at Henry. “I can tell you where to look, fast-track your discovery. But you’ll have to be able to take it in right here, and right now.”

With half a sigh of relief and all the certainty of the universe in his tone, Gansey said, “I can commit _anything_ to memory.”

Blue snorted at the boldness and yet she seemed genuinely proud of being beside Gansey in all of this. 

“I wouldn’t have pinned you for the type to go for overachievers,” Seondeok mocked Henry, benevolently. “Very well, Just Gansey, listen up.”

The list that followed was long, convoluted. Places and years, sometimes precise dates, when it was easy. Name of transports and routes when it was more complex. References to specific peoples and obscure military acronyms for cataloguing purposes when it was outright mental. 

In all of this, Gansey was silent, staring very pointedly at Seondeok’s lips as if committing to memory required more than hearing. When she stopped talking, he did not say a word, not even an acknowledgement, and broke completely the character of a young man invited out for lunch. 

With his chin to his chest and his index fingers pressed against his ears to block out the sound of the diner, Gansey remained in a sort of tense contemplation for second, after second.

“Thank you,” he said, at the end, to a Seondeok who was definitely observing the whole process with a sort of morbid, dissecting attention, like a bird of prey. “This might require some time, though.”

“You worry a lot, and assume there aren’t plans already in shape from other people. But I must admit I understand the approach,” Seondeok admitted. “If I’m correct...and I usually am...you will get something quickly enough from this contact. Finding the key to Artemus’s work has been a shared obsession, and they should be close.”

“How do we know that?” Blue asked, wary of the amount of people intertwining in this.

“Because I recently nudged this contact in the direction of the last piece of the puzzle,” Seondeok said, as if it were easy to shuffle pieces on such a big human chessboard. “And remember that this all relies on you being willing to do what it takes.”

At this, they all nodded without even having to look at each other. These weren’t moments, battles, in which a conservative effort was contemplated.

“Pull the thread, Just Gansey, and we might all see the tapestry come together.” Seondeok said, putting her chopsticks down in what seemed to be a clear sign that their allotted time was over. When she turned towards Henry, it was with a different tone, and fully in Korean. “Do you trust them, adeunim?”

It was sudden and almost too personal, and yet Henry was stuck with the need of making her _understand_ , keeping the communication in the language his mother chose. 

“I love them,” he whispered.

In the first language he had ever learned — that he had learned in this woman's arms — the statement was so intense that it gave him a sense of vertigo, as if the confession came from someone else. 

His mother tilted her head to the side, eyeing Henry with something like dedication, even as they kept speaking in a language that the rest of the table would not understand. “It’s good to hear you say it, but it’s not what I asked.”

“Eomma, I drift with them,” he murmured, feeling like a little kid being handled a book too complex for his reading skills. “I will always trust them.”

Seondeok smiled, and it rang more like the smile Henry remembered from hazy memories of his childhood — when his mother had a name that did not sound like a war title, but for Henry she was just _eomma_. “That’s all I wanted to hear,” she said, in Korean, and then did a vague gesture with two fingers that seemed to summon people at her attendance from thin air. When she spoke again, it was in English, looking at Blue and Gansey. “Very well, then, this will be everything and I won’t be in Hong Kong long enough that our meeting could cause a problem.”

They all got up, but they still lingered, uncertain on whether they had actually been dismissed.

It was almost a surprise, when Seondeok beckoned him with half a gesture and Henry bent over automatically. It had been a very long time since the last time his mother had kissed him on the cheek. He blinked hazily, swallowing against the pressure on his throat.

“Sawi, myeoneuli,” she called, turning towards Gansey and Blue. “I did what I could to keep my son in one piece in ten years of war. I’ll leave him with you, to handle the rest.”

Henry could feel his cheeks burning, and turned away from the awkwardly formal bowing that Gansey and Blue reserved for Seondeok, catching on the weight of the statement even without any understanding of Korean honorifics. 

“Thank you, eomeonim,” Henry said, as a completely different tuk tuk clattered to a stop outside of the shop. He felt tentative in saying more, in the grip of the chaos that was unleashing.

“Until next time, see if you bring us out of the shadows,” his mother supplied, still smiling like a fox but with more complicity simmering under the surface.

Back in the streets, Hong Kong was loud in a brutal, disorienting way, and Henry was sure that if he were to rush back into the shop his mother would be nowhere to be found. 

“Are you okay?” Blue asked, climbing squarely on Henry’s lap rather than sprawling over him and Gansey, in the back of the tuk tuk.

With Blue’s arm around his shoulders and Gansey’s hand reaching to twine their fingers together, Henry settled, uncertainly, and nodded.

“You’re still very red,” Gansey considered, incongruently serious for someone who was bouncing around a precarious means of transportation. “What did she call us?” 

The fact that Gansey very carefully did not ask what they said to each other in Korean meant that Henry felt very much obliged to tell him at least what directly concerned them. “ _Sawi_ and _myeoneuli_ ,” he repeated, more slowly, and looked straight towards the busy street. “That would be son- and daughter-in-law.” 

“Uh,” Gansey blinked, with a face that Henry supposed would have been appropriate for someone misplacing the good silver in the wrong cupboard in the house.

Blue broke into a giggling laughter that cut through the tension with the ease of a hot knife in butter. “That’s damn adorable, what are you looking so awkward about.” She kissed Henry’s temple, the only human being ever allowed this close to Henry’s hair before Gansey came around. “Mine is a bit slippery to pronounce but I guess I’ll figure it out. It’s not like you’re getting rid of us soon.”

“I don’t want to get rid of you soon,” Henry grumbled, irrationally embarrassed by the whole ordeal — or maybe just overwhelmed, which might have been worse. 

“He’s certainly not, so you can stop tormenting him for two seconds, Jane,” Gansey supplied, but shuffled just a bit closer to Henry in his confirmation. Their hands pressed together from the wrist downwards and the unsteadiness of the tuk tuk bumped their shoulders together. 

“And where would be the fun in that?” Blue protested, but did not nettle him further. 

They rode in silence, knowing full well that there was more tactical planning to put in place — now that Noah Czerny existed and the nature of the drifting itself felt very close, almost inevitably so, to unleashing another war unto them.

Even through the alert that tensed Henry’s spine, the closeness of Blue and Gansey’s bodies and the phantom touch of his mother lips spread heat away from Henry’s cheeks and closer to the centre of his chest.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The frame of the door flashed red with the unmistakable sign of denied access, and Ronan had to quench the fruitless instinct of trying and kicking it down in retaliation.

“Can we just accept the fact that I don’t have access to the hangar?” Adam asked, beside him, with crossed arms and a vaguely judging expression. 

He was wearing one of Niall’s piloting suits, again, and it was still a disconcerting sight in some ways, with some of the protective plates ill-fitting on Adam’s physique. But a suit was mostly its connectors, and a pilot was all that was brought in the drift, so Adam was unique — and uniquely there just for Ronan.

“You’re my _fucking_ copilot, our Jaeger is on the other side of the damn door, you should have all the accesses that I have,” Ronan argued, feeling deeply irked by the whole ordeal. “Maybe we need to go and stir some shit up in the Logistics Department.”

Adam smiled at him, just the faintest suggestion of it, between amused and something else. “It’s already kind of crazy how hard-wired in the system your authorisations are, I was half-sure I was going to smash against the preparation room when you called for critical protocol.”

“Yeah, I know,” Ronan mumbled. It had been very close, a recent memory, in Adam’s mind — easy to catch through the drift. “You have some too, now, you know? Crazy authorisations I mean...but we need to be in Greywaren, there’s kind of an override from the Jaeger.”

And Greywaren was on the other side of this door, framed in a wall the top of which was painted with the deep blue of the Research, Development & Implementation section. 

“We’re not trying to overhaul the Shatterdome from the Jaeger or declare war to bureaucracy, you remember, right?” Adam said, leaning over against a wall beside the entrance — insistently shut.

Ronan remembered. They were just trying to keep the attention of most of the high-ranks occupied with their funky little idea, while Gansey, Blue and Henry went out to Hong Kong looking for intel.

Gansey had come to Ronan with just the vague knowledge of a meeting happening and that no one should be looking for them in the meantime. Ronan had not had ideas that did not involve some carefully-placed violence and destruction through the Headquarters to achieve the purpose, but with the awareness of his recent drifting still lingering, he had pointed to only one solution.

“Let me page Parrish,” Ronan had told Gansey.

And Adam had come to him, again. All the way across the Shatterdome, since he was still located in the Tech quarters. Ronan really needed to change this, to drag him all the way to _his own_ quarters, possibly — but Niall’s room was a sanctuary of everything that his father had left behind himself and Ronan would never deprive Adam of some approximation of _his space_. Maybe he could go and sleep on his floor more often, that was surely more reasonable.

“Give me an idea,” Gansey had told Adam, with no more details than he had provided Ronan before.

After two seconds of silence and a slow running of a hand through his hair, Adam had.

So they were here, now, and the idea was trying to initiate an unprecedented analysis of Dreamcatcher with Greywaren not deployed but both the pilots in an active drift.

Earlier, Declan had flashed an ambiguous, “We’ll have to discuss it,” through the comms. That didn’t mean _no_ , and he had been taken by surprise enough that Ronan was confident it would not only be a _yes_ , it would be a brilliant idea and he would get to watch Parrish drag the whole RDI. 

If only they could get into the hangar.

“Lynch,” Adam said, with that tone that give a thrill down Ronan’s spine because it usually meant something outrageous was coming. “What is the order of authorisations to access the piloting chamber in Greywaren?”

Ronan frowned, but still rattled off, “Registered biosignature, biosignature provided by the active suit connectors, general PPDC personal signature, and then there are some safety codes.”

“Neat,” Adam grinned a bit wider, in a way that was very difficult not to stare at, and he wrestled a bit with the high neck of the suit to snatch his own dog tags out. “Page your brother, we’re getting in.”

The statement shook Ronan out of his stupor over Adam’s right hand, fair and strong against the dark profile of the piloting suit. “Fucking how?”

Adam spun the dog tags around his fingers by their metal chain — very likely not as oblivious of Ronan’s fascination as Ronan would like to think — and hung them at the faucet of a nearby water fountain. He walked back with a peculiar expression — _he’s having a good time_ , Ronan realised belatedly, and the thought had a surreal twist.

“The doors are wired to catch the general PPDC personal signature first. And if I don’t bring any signature and yours is authorised…” 

“You’re fucking mental, Jesus,” Ronan interrupted him, tossing an arm across Adam’s shoulders to drag him close, and then forward.

“Wait until Dr Lynch has to quench the alarm because two people passed through instead of one,” Adam previewed, yet another brilliant showcase of how Adam had assimilated every technical aspect of the Shatterdome he could get his hands on. 

“Fuck _off_ ,” Ronan countered, admiring and already savouring the moment.

Everything was made even better by Adam slotting against his side, the profile of his lovely hand pressed in the middle of Ronan’s back. He was warm and solid and fell easily into a perfect walking synch with Ronan. 

They were going to drift again, so soon. 

Ronan’s stomach flipped at the thought, so much that he almost didn’t savour the moment of the doors blinking green and open, just like Adam had forecasted.

Luckily, Ronan had Declan in his line of sight, two bridges down in one of the control platforms of the hangar, so he got to follow his brother’s expression as Declan saw the two of them walking in, half-hugging, and then the alarm blaring off.

_“Double entrance detected.”_

“Shut that shitshow off,” Ronan called over, in lieu of a greeting.

The door of the hangar shut for security reasons, and the figure of Declan marching towards him was outlined by the red lighting of the lockdown. “Ronan, was is the meaning of this?”

“Parrish didn’t have access, so he took off his dog tags and now we’re in.” 

Declan blinked at them, lingering two seconds longer on the sight of Ronan’s arm over Adam’s shoulders. “You took off the dog tags.”

“You miss the memo that the order of the day is circumventing problems? Because we’ll be on Greywaren but apparently you have to be at the command console,” Ronan urged, feeling irrationally vindicated over how brilliant Adam had just proved himself to be.

“I apologise for the inconvenience,” Adam intervened, recomposing himself out of Ronan’s arm — with little consequence, they were going to _drift_ soon. “I hope the situation justifies the rush.”

Declan punched a code, confirmed it with his own dog tags, and completed the procedure with a double retina-fingertip scan. The entrance fell into silence again, and somehow that made Declan’s sour expression more evident. He turned towards the both of them, crossing his arms, and Ronan would have almost commended the lack of RDI Department uniform if not for the fact that Declan was basically wearing a suit without a jacket and the clear attitude of a professor close to scolding his misbehaving pupils shone through.

“Parrish, I would like to make clear that while the Corps appreciate your cooperation with the critical compromise protocol and its outcome, appointing an operative pilot like this is unprecedented.” He said, pointedly avoiding to look at Ronan but lingering on their father’s suit, on Adam. “Every authorisation that you don’t have is not likely to appear quickly, not as we have...very pressing matters.”

“I’m willing to work around it,” Adam replied, with a serene composure that seemed impermeable to Declan’s nudging.

There was a sick, subtle satisfaction in knowing that cracking Adam would take so much more than this. Declan could never imagine, but Ronan _knew_ — because they had tried to break each other, before their shattered edges had clicked.

Declan glanced at the door, now silent. “I daresay we noticed, Parrish.” The sarcasm was barely concealed. “It’s also against protocol to activate the warp-related procedure in the Shatterdome hangars, we’re not optimised for this type of testing and we can’t access the hangars that were originally used in the development of Mark-III-1.” 

“You have a stick so far up your ass you’re gonna spit it out any minute,” Ronan snarled. “We have to fix this. Dreamcatcher is working like shit, we don’t know what’s coming, and we have to _fix this_.”

“You sound very much like Dad, Ronan, and yet I bet, like him, you don’t have the keypass for Artemus’s drivers. Incidentally, that’s the thing that stands between us and fixing anything drift-related. Also, the thing I’ve been working on for _months_.”

Silence sliced through them like ice, pervading the very marrow of Ronan’s bones. He wanted to punch his brother _so desperately_. And he would have, but Adam grasped at his wrist, between their bodies, just above the connector’s line, so he didn’t. 

“I don’t propose to come in and fix it, sir, and I don’t believe I have a grasp of the problem in full,” Adam interjected, holding his ground even while de-escalating the situation — one pure American South approach at a time. “But I think we can bypass something by using the O.P.A.L. internal analysis, because Colonel Lynch and I did so in battle, and that will only work with Greywaren on an active idle.”

That was so indisputable that even Declan didn’t have an immediate reply. “I remember your post-fight debriefing. And I also looked at the logs, because it was impressively...functional...for something so hasty.”

“It’s standard approach in the Techs, things have to work even when the specifics are lacking, sir.” Adam said, without changing tone.

Declan seemed to be taken slightly aback, noticing the subtle hint of a gibe two seconds too late. Ronan could not avoid smirking. 

“Very well, we can analyse it,” Declan gave in, with half a sigh and an avoidant glance falling on the Jaeger that dominated the hangar. “I plan on providing you a new algorithm to deal with that dynamic energy capping procedure so that you don’t have to overload the processing power of the O.P.A.L...if it comes to it.”

Ronan did nothing to conceal the smirk. “You should really speed up those authorisations,” he whispered to his brother. He and Adam walked by him and then past him, towards the high bridge that would leave them with access to the pilot hutch. 

Adam moved around the metal gangways with ease, but he still lingered behind Ronan when they got to the point in line with Greywaren’s shoulders — thick with layers of shielding, only ever opening to allow access to the pilots.

“It’s gonna open for you, you know?” Ronan murmured. 

In their first and only mission Ronan had made sure Greywaren was ready and waiting for his arrival, so Adam’s nervous skepticism was almost understandable.

He wanted to be gentle but also incapable of real coddling. Reaching for Adam’s shoulders and pushing him forward, bodily, seemed like a good compromise.

Adam stumbled, more precarious than his usual agility because the suit was optimised for the harness, not for casual wear. It was still worth it, if only for the astonishment on Adam’s face when his proximity triggered the shielding opening — a first-time witness.

_“Pilot onboarding. Adam Parrish, platform B.”_

Ronan looked at Adam, lingering at the edge of the bridge and not quite daring to step out, and smiled, a bit secretive. The emotion was going to flood through the neural connection — Ronan could hardly wait — so close, _so soon_. Still, he let him be, for as long as that might take Adam. For once, this wasn’t a rushed procedure.

_“Pilot onboarding. Ronan Lynch, platform A.”_

Side by side, Ronan was suddenly reminded of the first time he had ever accessed Greywaren — its Mark-I version, rough around the edges but still the gateway to a whole new world. His father had stood with him, and Ronan had been certain he must have been as stupefied as Adam was now. He hung onto the memory — bitter, sweet, shattered — ready to offer it in the drift.

“Your call, Parrish,” he said, with a little tilt of his head towards the inside of the hutch.

Adam took a long breath, and smiled at Ronan in what appeared to be a little emotional crack in Adam’s usual somberness. “Okay, let’s do this.” 

They stepped in, walking forward to the empty harness of the two piloting stations. The chamber lit up, going live with their access. 

It had been a very long time since the last time Ronan had had any impression of _savouring_ this. It was irresponsible, in a moment like this, and yet wonderfully real — hiding a purpose bigger than just gritting their teeth through the apocalypse. 

“Still your call,” Ronan confirmed, as their weight on the platforms brought down all the cables and led them to join the connectors, in a perfect automated synch for the both of them.

Adam swallowed deep, a bit dry, and then looked forward towards the widow, the panoramic vision of the Hangar spreading in clusters of pixels.

“Set mode to active,” Adam enunciated, almost too careful as if the system was going to misunderstand his vocal signature. He looked over to Ronan, just a glance, as they both settled in their positions. “Ready-steady.”

From the neutral tone, the lighting in the hutch turned blue and almost subdued. On the screen, the report windows of their physical stats flashed up. It couldn’t be more different from last time, and yet Ronan’s stomach was heavy with nervousness when the system notified, _“Initialising neural connection.”_

Ronan had a vague memory of summer in his childhood, never as warm as he was used to in Hong Kong, or earlier in Sydney, but surprisingly intense in the handful of days in which Ireland woke up willing to indulge his citizens. There had been lakes, or rivers, or the same river was also a lake, and he and his brothers would always find the highest point to jump from. Whilst other details were fuzzy, Ronan remembered the breathtaking anxiety that preceded every jump, no matter how eager he had been for it. But he would always, always jump. 

He crushed into this drift with the exact same spirit, and the memory itself jolted along the connection like a flagship exploring untested waters.

It bounced forward, and forward, branching up in different shapes as Adam latched onto it. 

In exchange, Ronan got a sudden flash of pouring rain, slicing through the sticky humidity of summer in Virginia, raindrops clattering against the roofs of worn-out trailers, but mostly running along Adam’s overheated face. 

_“Stabilising.”_

Of the many possible things running through their memories, Adam latched onto Declan, chasing impressions of Ronan’s brother through Ronan’s own eyes. 

Too serious, always frowning, and somehow reluctant in following through Father’s stories. It was difficult to grasp what Declan was always so displeased about, when for Ronan the sun rose in the morning because Niall said so. And if Ronan was Niall’s favourite, so what? He was so perfectly fitting that they could pilot together. Declan had spent his life poring through blueprints and dynamics — for all of Father’s ideations, for all of their necessities, with such a level of complexity that even Niall deferred to him in some aspects. And yet, Niall’s last thought for his firstborn had been that Declan needed to _try harder._

Ronan rebounded the concept itself through Adam’s mind. It was easy, almost, because Adam’s entire life was based on trying _harder_. Trying and failing — _there was no way to stop getting hit_ — and failing — _he wanted an academic out and the lack of hearing was driving him crazy_ — and failing — _he really thought he would pilot, he really really did._ Adam could almost appreciate what it was like to be Declan Lynch — and Declan Lynch from Adam’s eyes seemed to be a creature much different from what Ronan himself had ever considered.

_“Neural handshake established, drift active.”_

“It’s not the same thing,” Ronan said, batting his eyes back in focus, _non sequitur_ for whoever had not been in their heads just now. 

Adam was almost awkward beside him, guilty of the derailed train of thought. “I know,” he said, but he still thought of it.

“Greywaren, do you copy?” Declan’s voice cut obviously through their halted conversation, more in shared feelings and concepts than actual words.

“We copy,” they said, at unison. 

“A wonder, if we’re being completely honest. I see here that the system automatically recalibrated the standards for a conflicting drift to fit you best, or you would always have alerts blaring halfway through.” Declan said. They could see him in the dialogue window, scrolling with the chair through a large console, no assistants in sight.

“‘Cause you’re contrary,” Adam whispered Ronan. Ronan didn’t need to look at him to catch the inherent mellowness. He grasped at the handles better, even though there was no purpose in it — they weren’t here to pilot.

“So, Parrish, entertain me,” Declan said, lounging with his back against the chair and looking up at Greywaren — and, presumably, his own report screen. “Now that we have a Jaeger in ready-steady outside of a designated safe zone, what do you need the O.P.A.L. to compute?”

Ronan had to refrain from the temptation of telling Adam _you see?_ over his brother’s tone. Adam still got the message, and there was a feeling coming back, because they _were_ entertaining Declan — and making sure that whoever in the high-ranks got interested in what the pilots were doing would catch Adam, Ronan and Greywaren in risky dealings with Declan, rather than an absent but overall innocent Team Raven King.

“I would like you to program that algorithm, but do you have the charge-discharge performances of Dreamcatcher through the years?” Adam asked, not fully rhetorical but Ronan could easily grasp what type of answer he was expecting. 

The screen of Greywaren cleared of their synching data — a beautiful unrepentant mess that crashed them together every time — and Ronan settled more fully in the harness, ready to enjoy the show.

“Summaries, the drift-sustained neural network allows for a flow of data that not even the hardware hangar of the Shatterdome would easily handle,” Declan had to admit, with that tone of voice that seemed to suggest that he knew exactly where this was heading.

“Good thing that Greywaren knows, then.” Adam smirked, just a bit. “Opal, I need you to focus on warping events of the last two years, from 5 seconds before Dreamcatcher activation to 10 seconds after. Total warping energy available as a function of timestamp.”

“Processing,” the system replied, and the screen flashed unevenly, with response windows opening and closing without showing everything as the internal database was scoured. 

“Did you just chat up the AI?” Declan’s face in the corner of the screen with the close-up video comm was superbly perplexed.

“He always chats up the AI, I think she likes him,” Ronan replied, grinning even wider at the subtle look of concentration on Adam’s face — incredibly alluring, as always. 

The system was silent but the computation was running through the drift, and on top of that Adam’s mental vision was adjusting the results on the go. It was confusing to follow, and there was no doubt none of this would be feasible in battle — and yet, not in battle, the protocol required keeping the Jaeger strictly offline. 

“Since when the AI is a she?” Oblivious of the details of their synched mind, Declan seemed weirdly invested in driving the point across as he waited.

Ronan shrugged. “The fuck are you asking me for, I’m not the one who programmed this shit to speak with the creepy little girl voice...no offence, Opal, we’re all thrilled to have you.”

Adam snickered. Being able to sense the surge of amusement through the sheer focus was more exciting than Ronan ever assumed.

Adam liked him. He found Ronan funny, sharp. _Hot._

“You’re so distracting, quit it,” Adam hissed, evidently getting the shadow feeling of Ronan racking through his lingering thoughts. The reproach lacked edge, though, because he was smiling, a bit defiantly.

Declan cleared his voice through the comms, and when they looked back at the video feed both his eyebrows were raised, judgingly. “I was saying,” Declan stressed over the sentence — both of them must have missed a piece of a conversation that wasn’t happening in their drift, “that my analysis points towards worsened performance of Dreamcatcher after Doomsday. It’s compatible with the extensive damages.”

Ronan hadn’t meant for this thoughts to just roam off at the mention of it, and yet they had. 

The Jaeger’s sensors had overlaid too many channels, trying to give them vision deep in the Ocean, and the effect had been dark and disorienting. Oppressive, too, with kilometers of water pressing down on them. Dark, and then too bright once they got close to the actual Rim, fighting with the impossible force that had been keeping them away. The comms had flickered, unstable, bringing the broken suggestion of screams coming from the other Jaegers — dying to hold the line. They would all die at the bottom of this ocean, the thought still had a nauseatingly _certainty_ in it, even now that it was over.

Both he and Adam recoiled, and the whole hutch lit up for an uncertain moment, sensing a crisis.

Even Declan fell silent, for some rigid seconds.

Ronan thinned his lips with an apologetic look — and apologetic thoughts — crossing over to Adam. Adam just looked back him, in check again in the span of what it took him to take a breath in and a breath out — always so _sturdy_ — and lightly shook his head, with more worry than anything. 

“I think we established that the worst drifting damage wasn’t on Greywaren,” Ronan scrambled to regain the train of thought of a discussion with which he would never involve himself — even less so with Declan — if it weren’t for the fact that they had a _covering_ to provide here.

“True, but we lost you for a long time.” His brother’s tone was so pensive, almost considerate, that Ronan almost hated it. From the trails of Adam’s thoughts he knew that the HQ had suffered with them, committed to the same burden. By contrast, there was no way of knowing how Declan had dealt with it. “You shouldered the blast of the bomb closing the Rim on the tail of your last warping, the systems are heavily interconnected.”

“But we never found a clear damage, even while putting Greywaren back in shape,” Adam interjected, fully aware of most of the procedures the Tech team had to go through, after Ronan re-entered — without Niall.

There was a frustrated click of tongue from Declan’s side. “Well, welcome to reason number one we need Artemus’s original files. There is only one copy of the full drifting core mechanism, and it cannot be deduced from the top down...not for my lack of trying”

The plots began to pop up right in that second, with a little ting to catch everyone’s attention.

It listed every file, every warp. All the time Ronan and his father had ever used Dreamcatcher piled up, and Adam had purposefully excluded the last file they engaged in together from the pile. 

“Okay this is better, can you see this, Dr Lynch?” Adam asked. 

Regrouping from the previous distraction, Declan collected his tablets, in addition to the computing console of the RDI hutch. “I can, but the data remain impossible to export.”

“Let me see, maybe I can compile a synopsis for external reporting at the end and we retain something,” Adam considered.

Ronan leaned into the harness again, with a small sigh. He could feel Adam tapping his fingers distractedly in the handles, a small tic of concentration. The most that Ronan had to do was keep the Jaeger in check — avoid it moving on inadverted stimuli — and following the beauty of Adam’s mind firing up with thoughts. 

In turn, Adam’s mind leaned against Ronan’s own, just like it had when he’d had to trust Ronan to guide them through the moves of piloting. 

Ronan had never been as aware of the process, with Niall. They had shared too much history. The entirety of Ronan’s life was known to his father and through the years it felt like very little was unknown. In this case, by contrast, it was like a low friction, Adam sliding through the fabric of Ronan’s mind just as he had caressed a hand over Ronan’s body — picking up dates, places, events, sometimes just trusting him to do a quick mental calculation.

It was disconcerting, and yet Ronan never wanted him to stop. 

“There can be definitely some correlation between Doomsday and Dreamcatcher glitching,” Adam said, at the end. He turned over Ronan, a shadow of a smile at his train of thought, distracted and inconsequential with the rest of the conversation he was having. Declan was watching them — _too much_ — but Ronan couldn’t bring himself to care. “My best guess is that we lost an energy calibration, maybe after an overload during Doomsday.” 

“And you decided on the run to cap the power and lower the possible activation energy,” Declan considered, low and pensive.

“Yes, because the warp builds up faster at the beginning but struggles to saturate,” Adam confirmed.

“That’s very quick thinking.”

Ronan has never heard Declan pay a compliment to anyone in his life, or so it felt. 

It made something incredibly grumpy bubble through Ronan’s chest, even more so as Adam latched onto the feeling. With his head half to the side, Adam lifted an eyebrow, a low _seriously?_ flickering across their connection. Ronan huffed just a bit and held on tighter at every point connecting them — intense, persistent and incapable of helping it. 

“Lynch,” Adam said, and though Declan blinked up too this call was not for him — it felt like _Ronan_. “I want you to show me how we warp.”

“Don’t we have sufficient field experience?” Declan’s voice came through the comms.

“He means a full Dreamcatcher show, recovering objects,” Ronan filled him in, looking at Adam and feeling a bit less cross in their drift-channeled privacy that Ronan was forced to let other people witness. “We haven’t tried, we should.”

“Inside?!” Declan protested, with a marvellous sense of outrage that only cemented Ronan’s will to go forward with it.

“I’m not annihilating the fucking base, Declan, I’ll just show Parrish the ropes...and you can do your live-testing whatever the fuck you’re planning,” Ronan countered, dismissive as if he did not know perfectly well what type of energy profile Adam wanted to see in this little trial.

“I’ll hold you single-handedly responsible for each and every outcome of this, Ronan, are we clear on this?” Declan said, after a bit of silence, attempting a stern tone. The tone of someone trying to keep some measure of control and rationality as everything kept unravelling — but that was an half-foreign type of awareness, coming through the drift with Adam’s assessment. 

“I’m fucking shivering,” Ronan mocked, but still found himself following up. “I know what I’m doing, Declan, even without Dad.”

That seemed to have caught Declan by surprise, quenching the argument before it could even begin — better than profanity, better than conflict. It was frankness, which Ronan appreciated and elevated to a religion, just delivered in a sly fashion. Ronan looked to his side, and Adam lifted a fair eyebrow up, vaguely amused. The slyness only had one precise source, in this drift.

“No chainsaws,” Declan capitulated, with a low sigh.

“Fuck you, chainsaws are awesome,” Ronan countered, bringing the tone of conversation to something that was more familiar with his own brother.

Still, he wasn’t really planning for a chainsaw — there wouldn’t even be enough space in this hangar to get it equipped without shattering half the gangways that spanned the hangar. 

Breaking the previous immobility of their Jaeger, Ronan lifted Greywaren’s left hand, and through the comms came the low whistling sound of the shielding plates lifting. Right on the screen, reacting to nothing but Ronan’s thoughts, the system flashed, _“Dreamcatcher - charged, idle”, “Ammunition socket - 7/10 filled, available slots open.”_

Adam’s excitement thrummed along their connection — nervous, disbelieving, ecstatic — at the thought alone of being able to do something so legendary. Ronan thought back to trampolines and mindless jumps into the water — only now, it was Ronan who should show Adam how to jump. He felt Adam’s uncertainty, as if he wasn’t contributing anything to the effort, and purposefully snatched hangar location, ammunition specifications and general outline of the object out of Adam’s mind, making sure to leave a trail. 

Then, Ronan let everything light up in his mind, real instead of abstract.

All the way through, the bitter ache of realising how different this was from having his father in the drift settled in Ronan’s sternum, or at least it tried to. But Adam was there to catch Ronan’s grief, too, and hold it close — not smothered but steadied, as the static of the incoming thunder tingled along their backs. 

When they sparked the warp, they sparked it together. 

It was blinding and breathtaking — Adam’s mind made everything sharper, and being in charge of it made Ronan’s head spun with vertigo.

In such a secluded space, it was like feeling the air compressing around them, as if trying to accommodate a mystical entity too big to be contained.

Three clacks, sounding distant even though they were so close.

_“Gadget equipped.”_

As Ronan’s vision cleared, the screen reporting went back into focus.

_Ammunition socket - 10/10 filled, slots locked. Ready._

It was nothing too impressive, but Adam still chuckled under his breath, full of wonder in a way that made Ronan want to show him each and every thing in the world, just to see what would make him the happiest.

“Pretty good, mh?” Ronan whispered to him.

“It’s _amazing,_ ” Adam replied, even though Ronan already knew. It was still good, to hear it.

“And we definitely have a problem,” Declan added, cutting through again with a small click of his tongue. 

They both looked forward again, and admittedly the screen was not merciful in its report.

_‘Dreamcatcher’ status: charging. Next warping available in: 00.00.33._

“Jesus fuck,” Ronan groaned. The strong instinct of headdesking something was only contained by the piloting harness. “33 seconds for three ammos from within the base is a joke.”

They were all aware, but they might as well admit it. 

Adam took a long breath in and then a shallow breath out. Prompted by his train of thoughts, O.P.A.L. began to provide a fresh series of tables and plots on the energetics of Dreamcatcher.

“Okay,” Adam said, canting his head to the side as if perspective changed everything. “Let’s work on this a bit.”

_Working on it_ ended up entailing no less than twenty warping tests, and _a bit_ was an indefinite amount of time that ended up stretching the span of three more hours. 

By the end of it, Ronan was as drained as he would have been from a battle, but without the adrenaline that came with it, the effect was more disorienting.

Apparently Dreamcatcher in a material-channeling warp — as Adam and Declan decided to baptise what happened when objects were being moved to and from the Jaeger — hijacked most attempts at containing the energy, taking what it needed and when it needed it. They weren’t closer to figuring out why, exactly, they were losing recharging time, but at least Declan seemed to get something out of it and promised them he would implement some protocols to try and circumvent draining everything regardless of the object and the distance.

The perks of disengaging in the Shatterdome were undoubtedly having direct use of the shower in the pilot quarters. Nevertheless, not even a proper stream of hot water completely wiped flashing graphs, reporting codes, and crowded tables from Ronan’s retinas.

“Are you okay?” Adam asked, putting his clothes back on in the narrow changing room. The fact that he seemed tired as well did not make Ronan feel particularly vindicated.

“Your brain is a nightmare and it’s giving me a headache,” Ronan grumbled, with no particular heat behind it. “It’s actually very Declan of you, no wonder you two were so into your little nerd-chit-chattering.”

“That’s rich, coming from someone who just _evoked_ stuff like it’s nothing, and left me to keep up with the warp,” Adam replied, dropping his towel on one of the benches.

“It’s not that crazy.”

“Oh it very much is,” Adam restated, walking to stand in front of Ronan. “I would have never pinned you for someone who could get _grumpy_.”

Ronan frowned against the tension lingering at his forehead. “I’m not fucking grumpy.”

“You are,” Adam said, smiling. He reached over to grab at the two ends of the towel Ronan had abandoned around his shoulders, dragging him forwards until they stood face to face. “I’ve been in your head. _I know._ ”

Ronan found himself swallowing, suddenly aware of how close Adam was after at least a day at relative distance from each other. Adam felt so rooted in Ronan’s head, now that they had _time_ to drift together — rooted enough that it was almost incongruent to look at each other like this, physically, like anyone else could do. Adam’s place was in _Ronan’s head_ , but Ronan would be crestfallen if Adam were to not exist outside of it. It was all very conflicting. 

“Yeah…” Ronan breathed out, unable to break eye-contact. “Yeah, you’ve been in my head,” 

Leaning in and kissing him felt like the only possible step, a fated move that brought them together. And Adam was already surging up, meeting Ronan half-way.

They kissed almost chastely, for a couple of seconds — lips against lips in a cherished contact. When they opened their mouth it was a synchronous decision that they never communicated to one another out loud. 

Ronan was just tilting his head to deepen the kiss further when a little _ping_ of matching authorisation came, and the entrance door to the shower rooms slid open. 

In his exhausted disorientation, Ronan had not lost his deeply-trained reflexes, but somehow they didn’t aid him in distancing himself harshly from Adam. 

In the same unison that brought them to kiss, they separated in a soft motion, stilted only by Ronan, who succumbed to the temptation of stealing another kiss off Adam even though there was someone in the room. Some points deserved to be made.

Only then he turned around.

Gansey stood very still under the doorframe, looking as if he had been handed a new development on string theory and asked to comment on it straight away. At his right side, Blue tilted her head sideways, with a borderline prurient interest in the development. Henry was barely behind Gansey’s back, but he was tall enough to have perfect visual, and looked to be on the verge of cracking into laughter, to the point that he covered his mouth. 

Adam let go of his grip on Ronan’s towel neatly, recomposing his position without really trying to explain what he was doing — which was, frankly, unmistakable. He said, “Hello, welcome back,” all casual. 

It was the most amusing thing Ronan had ever heard, which was saying something, considering that he was currently engrossed in a staring contest with Gansey, who was glancing at Adam, and then back at Ronan. Ten years of shared life told Ronan that this was the universal sign for _I’m not flabbergasted but you just gave me something I’ve never walked into before._

“You took your sweet fucking time, do we have something?” Ronan said, with no greetings. He broke eye contact with Gansey and made a point of glaring at Henry who still looked too close to laughing his ass off. 

“Yeah, we think that…” Blue started, looking at Adam and losing her train of thought. “Wow, I mean… _wow_ …”

“Blue…” Adam started, almost _embarrassed._

It would have been infuriating if Ronan hadn’t been in Adam’s mind — a ruthless, uncompromising mind. He would not accept compromises on Ronan, but he liked to do things and disclose events at his own time and way. It felt nice, knowing it.

Blue waved her hand, dismissing the discussion before it could even happen. “We had the meeting, we have news, we could roll it.”

“Yeah, and thank you for _covering_ , guys,” Henry said, with a tone that suggested Ronan and Adam spent the time kissing and called it a decoy. Ronan flipped him the bird for good measure.

Gansey cleared his throat, regaining composure. Ronan had counted the seconds, and he considered it a record given that Helen had not been involved in this freeze. “Ronan, can we take the car? I think we have a plan.”

“Yeah, come on, shithead.”

Ronan dropped his towel on the bench, right on top of Adam’s, and went to walk out, feeling strangely _bold_.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The sun was setting over the Hong Kong bay and Blue had taken off her shoes to sit on the concrete, still warm after a long, sunny day.

She already knew _the plan_ , but she had listened to Gansey and occasionally Henry bringing Adam and Ronan up to speed for the better part of the past hour. The overall concept was not going to be so convoluted: talk with Helen, arrange a meeting with her contact who was apparently a contact for many people, bargain for some information, hope to have something useful to wager in a cornering of Maura and Declan. 

The last point had involved a heated discussion with Ronan, who seemed to have dragged Gansey to the brink of exasperation, and that, in itself, was fairly interesting.

“Ronan, for God’s sake,” Gansey snapped, after the third circle of arguments about trusting, not trusting, how to trust, and when. “Would you like to enlighten me on how you will close the gap between maybe getting something on Artemus’s files but not involving Declan?”

“I don’t fucking know!” Ronan had to admit, after a couple of false starts. “But now we’ve got Parrish, who is a fucking genius, so we’ll crack this for sure.”

“I’m very flattered, Lynch,” Adam had replied, with the same tone of mockery that would often escalate into a fight between them — and a whole new edge to it now that they had caught them kissing. “Even if that was true, and I doubt it, I can’t do anything with the whole pile of access...which is, incidentally, Declan’s. So, I don’t know, come again?”

To Ronan’s unintelligible grumble, Henry piped in, “Not to rain on anyone’s paranoia parade, I get how important it is to maintain a healthy level of drama, but if we’re facing a problem that is coming from Manila, I highly doubt Dr Lynch can be the key to the conspiracy.”

“And your mother didn’t hint at anything on that side,” Gansey added.

“And my mother didn’t hint at anything, yes, thank you,” Henry confirmed. “We’re shortcut, short on time, with a missing core...how many more little dances can we possibly do?”

“Fuck you, okay, whatever,” Ronan groaned at the end. “Just don’t come cry to me because he’s an asshole.”

“Don’t worry, we know you like to have the asshole-corner covered yourself,” Adam replied, deadpan.

Between Henry’s laughter and Gansey’s surprised snort, Ronan flipped the second bird of the afternoon to his own copilot. “Gansey, stop giggling like a little girl. Let’s talk bargaining tools.”

The conversation that followed was painstakingly detailed. 

The start was fascinating in its own right, when Ronan asked for details and Gansey actually managed to rattle off everything Seondeok had told them — looking unfairly sexy while doing so. After that, it was a terrifying display of military nitpicking. 

It was yet another evidence that Gansey and Ronan had something between them — a shared life, a shared framework — that Blue and Henry would never be able to fake or approximate. In this, even Adam was an odd one out — with his hypercompetency worn as a vocation and a coping mechanism at the same time — and he seemed to follow with more focus, and some interesting insights. 

Blue’s thoughts wandered, wishing desperately for silence on too many levels. But the turbines were still mingling with the chatter, and she was surely not going to have this wish granted — this, like many others.

“B.?” Henry called over, when she rested her forehead in the span of her hands.

“It’s fine,” Blue replied, distractedly. “I know it’s shocking, but I’m thinking too.”

“That’s not so shocking, you just do it wildly,” Henry countered with ease, as if unperturbed by the crazy unfolding of this situation. 

Blue turned to look at him — at all of them — and he caught them all sort of staring. She hadn’t realised they were done talking and that she had focused their attention. 

It was difficult, seeing them like this. Half-strangers, half-family. People that she barely knew in the big scheme of things, for the most part. But she was going to war with them, she would start a war for _them_. Her boys. 

“We’re really in this together, aren’t we?” Blue said, even though their faces called this apparent _non sequitur_ for what it sounded like. 

Gansey was so genuinely confused to be almost endearing. “Of course we are. Who else would there be?”

“Then I’ll take the bait,” Blue continued, getting up from the artificial concrete shore. “What happened with Artemus? I get that everyone knows him, he was the head of the RDI, and whatnot...but now he’s dead, right? So, how did he die and how do we know he didn’t screw us over before his sad offing?”

There was a second of silence, partially surprised but also vaguely uncomfortable in Ronan and Gansey’s side. 

“You’re a maggot, but you’re also a pilot.” To her great surprise, it was Ronan who broke the silence. His blue eyes were looking away from her, but he spoke with the certainty of religion. For a second Blue wasn’t sure if she was listening to the legacy of Niall Lynch. “We’re a team, the Marks-III are always a team. We’re not hiding shit from you.”

“Then will you tell me what happened?” Blue escalated, even though it was weird to hear Ronan, who barely granted people _names_ plastering a nickname on her just as Gansey had. 

“Jesus fuck,” Ronan uttered, running a hand over his buzzed-cut hair. Blue felt the _it’s classified_ so close she could taste it but instead, to her great surprise, Ronan kept talking. “Artemus died to guide us to the Rim. Me and my father, I mean.”

The hum of the water turbine hummed like a lament around them, and they all stayed very, very still.

“Ronan…” Gansey started.

“Fuck it,” Ronan stopped him before he could go any further, eloquently. “Dad knew the drill...probably better than a lot of people on the base, but also better than me, because the drift is a bit...capricious,” He didn’t feel the need to explain it further, they all had experience of the flaky quality of what could filter, of how emotions ran over technicalities. “The point is...is that those motherfuckers from the ocean were sentient as well, right? And ten years of expeditions never brought us close to the Rim, it was like a damn force field of destruction or something. Artemus adapted one of the machines for drift-testing and he...he kind of drifted with a Kaiju. A Kaiju’s brain, sort of.”

“He what, now?” Henry exhaled, not hiding a certain level of disgust.

“Yeah, I know, fucking tell me about it,” Ronan hissed, with the tone of someone who did not wish to be challenged for his throne of most-Kaiju-unfriendly-person. “But it worked. He found us a path...showed it to us, all the way through. We would have never gotten that close, close enough to warp, otherwise. They would have killed us, and I’d say the motherfuckers already tried hard enough.”

At this, even Gansey looked away. Once again, Blue felt vaguely guilty for her habit of trampling through each and every delicate spot like a bull in a china shop. And yet, she thought spitefully, it wasn’t her fault she had to talk with veterans of a war that wasn’t really over. 

Maybe, in a different life, in a different moment, she could manage to be delicate — for Henry, and Gansey, but maybe Adam too, and even Ronan.

“How did he guide you?” Adam piped up, after a very long silence. He had a frown of sharp concentration in his face, and he channeled Ronan’s attention like no one else could. “You said he guided you until the very end, but I was in the Hall all the way through Doomsday and we lost you a lot...we barely knew where you were, and I’m sure you know we weren’t communicating smoothly.”

“Fuck, I don’t know...I mean...I’m not sure it makes sense…” Ronan took a couple of steps around, walking off a steam of not-quite-nervousness. “I think he used the drift, like we were on the drift and he was on the drift even though it wasn’t _our_ drift.”

“That would be insane. Two drifts drifting...” Blue murmured. Wonderful and impossible, but insane.

“It probably was,” Ronan said, stopping. “Artemus died for it, when we detonated the Rim. So it was really fucking mental.”

“Maybe _how mental_ will only be in his notes, at this point,” Adam considered.

The sun was past the horizon by now and the whole shore was rapidly falling into blue shadows around them. The constant humming of the turbine and a distant, subdued screeching of seagulls served as background, encompassing. They could still see each other, standing so close, but their expressions rapidly diffused in the darkness, until there was only a sense of reciprocal awareness.

Standing tall and resolute, Gansey said, “Then let’s go get these notes.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Getting to the crux of the matter required Gansey to acknowledge that there was little in his life that moved smoothly without Helen’s involvement. 

By itself, it wasn’t such a stunning development. It had always been like this, following her steps closely and trusting her to land them both on safe ground. But it was different in the execution this time, because he was walking on a parallel path and not right beside her.

“So, I’m working on collecting this info with the others...discreetly, of course,” Gansey told her, at the end of the big debriefing moment, and pointing out at the inventory issues.

“That sounds solid. Be careful on this specific brand of surface-to-air ballistics, it’s gonna get you into a huge amount of clearance locks,” Helen tapped with a finger on the napkin they were using as a highly biodegradable notepad just for this conversation. The paper was already half-destroyed by the strokes of pen and it was likely inintelligible for other human beings even now.

“I was thinking of chaining this research into the one for the supply chain coming from the Madagascar route, to muddy the waters a bit.”

“Good call.” Helen winked a bit and then lifted up. “I want this intel once you’re done with it, regardless. Worse case scenario I can use it across the board and instill the fear of God in some fussy diplomats and politicians in the U.N. meetings.”

It wasn’t quite a question, but Gansey said, “Sure,” and Helen winked conspiratorially. 

“So, shoot, Dick,” she said, wrinkling the napkin in her mechanical hand. Her prosthetic looked a bit different, for the second time in two weeks. It was difficult, not to feel guilty for all the reluctance towards Declan, when that was evidently Declan’s making. “What’s the big sister fix-it in this whole mess?”

Gansey huffed and went to lean on the table beside her. They were in Helen’s room, with one of the little comm-quenching equipments she reserved for occasions like this whirring, attached to her belt. “Could you get a meeting with this contact of yours? And I’ll go there in your place.”

“Are you kidding me?” Helen let a laugh slip out. “I can get a meeting, but you’ll get shot point-blank if you try to pull that little stunt.”

In ten years of war together, and five years in each other’s heads, Gansey would have sworn that the only person they knew that was likely to shoot someone first, ask questions later, was Calla. Maybe Mother on a very bad day, but never towards her carefully-cultivated offspring. 

He hummed, to mask the confusion. “So what do we do?” 

Helen combed a hand through her hair, uneven with the undercut and always more messy when she did something like this. A couple of meditative seconds of silence passed by. “I think I can arrange a meeting with all of you. For straightforwardness, and so that you can have each other’s backs. But do try and...arrange to be the spokesman, or have a spokesman. You know you don’t do negotiations in teams.”

Gansey could picture it, for a second, the five of them with all their pilot-madness combined, speaking simultaneously with a single counterpart. “I thought we established we didn’t want to get shot,” he said, snorting on a laugh. “But we can’t all leave the base together, not if we want a stealth mission...we have required availability and no pilot ever goes off-call.”

“I’m very well aware, thank you,” Helen said, only a bit ironic. She knew him so well, the ways he would discuss practicalities only by laying them out as if he was telling a story, and she would never get offended. “We can circumvent this by sending you all out on a mission, far enough that you’ll get deployed in advance, like last time. But not out of quadrant, mind you,” she was very stern on this, and it felt like a possessive hug, somehow. “You’ll have the meeting at some point in the down time.”

“And the contact will just reach us where it’s convenient for us?” Gansey asked, trying to look at the plan from all the different lights, the different perspectives.

“They do tend to get around,” Helen winked at him, easy and self-assured.

A plan like this was too alluring to let go of, and so they went for it.

It was a very Helen plan, a little bit on the edge but still brilliantly and rigorously constructed. That much wasn’t surprising for Gansey. The delivery was a different matter, because she moved through people and motions that were unfamiliar to Gansey himself. 

In the months that had passed since Doomsday, since the last time they had drifted together, Helen had gotten back up alone, in her own way, after having fallen with Gansey.

She had let him go forward on his mission, and yet this was what it took Gansey to realise that he had let her go as well.

It made him sad, a bit outraged with the same self that was keeping on this track rather than rushing back to fix it. But also bittersweet happy that she would still wink at him as if they could have each other without being intertwined. 

Life after the drift was a weird concept. It would be good to consider it more often, and yet there wasn’t any time for it.

The entirety of their time and effort ended up concentrating on actually retrieving bargaining chips in form of intel and organising this joint mission-plus-undercover-operation. 

Neither of these pursuits was mindless, mostly because the operation would be completely real, and when Helen found a way to propose it to the high-ranks she did so with extensive marketing. Dispatching both Jaegers after the “surprise recovery” of Greywaren would be a statement, for the whole world to see — and also, Gansey thought privately, for whoever had tried to annihilate them in Okinawa.

The assholes — technical term borrowed from Ronan — were in Gansey’s mind constantly when they raked through years of supplying and stocking to find the loss of inventory.

Following the assumption provided by Seondeok, The Assholes had started off in Manila and then somehow dripped through the years like a venomous infiltration. None of the losses were monumental like the Fox’s core theft. They weren’t even enough to trigger an investigation from the Pan Pacific Defence Corps, even more so as they constantly happened around moments that Gansey could cross-correlate with virulent Kaiju attacks. But they would make a florid black market, and that thought was _sickening_.

They dispatched less than a week later. 

A bigger cargo ship than the ones from the Okinawa mission covered the distance between Hong Kong and Sanya — roughly 300 kilometers west, on the Hainan Island — bringing both Jaegers at the cost of some speed. It would have been a good nighttime trip, but there was a thick sense of paranoia lingering after the last mission, and everyone easily agreed that it was better to do this trip in daylight. 

Without the real urgency of an incoming Kaiju attack, the day they spent travelling was an unusual experience for Gansey, singular in a way that he hadn’t expected. 

The only clear directive was to stay within easy reach of the internal hangars where Greywaren and Raven King could be set into ready-steady in a handful of seconds. Apart from that, they had nothing else to do and a sunny day on a mostly-calm sea at their disposal. 

They hung out together on the bridge, coming back inside only when the sun was so bright it would have burnt both Ronan and Henry. Considering how everyone was worn thin by the intensive and rushed research effort, some hours of decompressing sounded a good idea. 

If it had been just Ronan and Gansey, like old times, they would have probably stuck to the inside rooms and trained. They were both wary of the sea, a relationship soured by a decade of having an ocean as an enemy. But none of the others had quite the same terrifying association, and everything was somewhat smoother to deal with. 

Outside of tactical considerations, Gansey had expected a lot of things, but not for it to be _fun_.

They played games with no real purpose, chattering on and off. 

Prompted by Henry, Gansey ended up explaining the whole Glendower story to Adam, who listened so attentively one might think there would be a follow-up exam on the subject. Outside of the reciprocal frictions and newcomers’ issues, Ronan and Blue together turned out to be two chaos agents, and the only thing that put a halt to their shenanigans was the serious concern that they were going to fall off board. At some point, Henry declared he was going to take a nap and with great shock first of all from himself, Gansey followed him into the break room. 

At the end, that call had ended up fairly popular. When Gansey woke up he was clustered between Henry and Blue. At the other side of the room, Ronan was sitting with his back to the corner of a couch and Adam was abandoned against his chest, slotted between Ronan’s spread legs, and they were both sleeping soundly. 

Throughout his life, Gansey had had families, comrades in arms, and subordinates. Sometimes these categories intersected, and glued with the urgency of war to build up the load-bearing walls of Ganseys’ life.

He had never had _friends_. 

It was hard to think about it, to feel it as something attainable. It had the flavour of an _after_ , and no one won wars while being distracted from current battles.

As the sun lowered on the horizon, Gansey found himself more rested than he had felt in a long while, and a bit readier to face the night to come — whatever it might bring them.

  
  


* * *

  
  


In the time it took for the five of them and their two Jaegers to settle into the very restricted base of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps in Hainan, the clear sky that had accompanied them from Hong Kong forsook them. Thick, grey clouds slid from the hinterlands all over the city of Sanya, and they left for their meeting under a pouring rain.

Henry had never been to this place before, and he held the strong belief that one should never do novel stuff under a heinous weather, especially under duress. It was around sunset, but it was so dark it might have been the middle of the night, and every tall building loomed over them in the exact same menacing way. 

Making good use of the tactical example provided by his mother, they dropped their service car somewhere at the outskirts of the town and proceeded to change three tuk-tuks to get to the meeting point, even though one would have sufficed. Gansey, who had been here on other occasions in the last ten years, swore that this place was absolutely beautiful, even after its Pacific-Rim-induced decay. It was difficult to believe him when the rain was clattering on the covering of their vehicle loudly enough to drown the thoughts in one’s head. 

Anxiety pooled in Henry’s guts, whether he wanted it to or not. 

They walked for the last segment, because they were supposed to follow some indications scattered around the streets — lamp posts, mailboxes, broken ads, screens, and shop shutters, guiding them closer and closer to the actual location. It was a miserable business, even with the coverage of the large umbrellas they had brought along, and the sensation of soaked trousers creeping up Henry’s thighs only worsened his mood.

Eventually they got to an alley in which most of the shops appeared to be in closing hours. It was not supposed to be a dead-end, but the scaffolding frames at the last building occupied most of the space, leaving barely enough room for one person at the time to walk by, if needed. 

Ronan and Gansey exchanged the tense look of two trained special-ops soldiers telegraphing to one another that this was going to be a tactical weakness in worst-case scenario. 

No matter how much they had discussed it, on and off during their journey, it remained evident that this whole arrangement was not intended for their comfort. Ronan had complained in several moments that they should be able to choose the grounds, or at the very least have a real location beforehand to do some proper logistical planning. Gansey hadn’t disagreed, but the rubbing thumb on the line of his lips had seemed to point out the unforgiving facts: they were out of time, out of options, and they had to suck this up. Their counterpart probably knew this too.

The comfort of knowing he was not the only nervous one was very little comfort at all. 

Henry would have closed their line, but Ronan did not let him, shutting his umbrella close and holding it by the middle. As he moved to settle at the rear, Adam reshuffled in the line, organically taking the spot in front of Ronan with a poignant look at Henry. There was little avoiding the aftereffects of the drifting — Henry himself did not want to stand far away from the rest of the Raven King team — so Henry ended up in the middle, behind Blue, who was short and would have lost all visibility otherwise. Gansey, of course, was their vanguard.

At the edge of the scaffolding, before the street narrowed, there was a service door left ajar. The wet asphalt of the street glittered golden with the sliver of light passing through it. It was, for all intents and purposes, a beacon. 

Having the umbrellas closed for maximum reactivity in case of threat meant that ten meters were enough to end up completely drenched. 

They stopped before the door because Gansey moved to plaster himself close to the frame of it, spinning the umbrella in one hand. Without entering the line of sight of the door, he tapped briefly on the metal surface close to the lock and sent it to swing open — quick and efficient. 

Silence followed, and the opening of the door did not seem to trigger anything in particular. 

Gansey’s dog tags flashed in his hands and he angled the back of them — smooth and reflective — at the brink of the doorframe. He moved only after, sure that whoever was waiting for them was not lurking to catch them at the very first step inside. Henry moved to follow, and at the corner of his eye he could see Ronan stalling — not enough to distance himself from the group, but sufficiently enough to walk backwards and keep visual on the rest of the alley. Neither of them had discussed this type of proceedings in detail, but Ronan and Gansey moved in a synch that went beyond the drift. 

The space inside was devoid of furniture; the fixtures of what might have been a cocktail bar were covered with plastic wraps tainted with paint and dust. The scaffolding covered most walls, muffling the sounds, but their entrance was accompanied by a subdued shuffle of the newspapers that covered the floor, no matter how quiet and careful they tried to be. A strong smell of cheap paint lingered in the air, almost distracting, and the lighting was too bright and not completely uniform, as if some of the neon had ended up wrapped too.

A man stood against what used to be the counter, an excellent impression of casualness in his limbs that would have not been out of place in a real leisure date. But everything else about it contrasted with it — not only for the chosen setting. He was dressed nondescriptly, almost _excessively so_ , in grey trousers and a grey shirt, with a darker grey coat tossed over the plastic. At a glance he could fit any age between 35 and 45 years old, with a strong built and an excellent posture that did not make him less deceiving of any real defining characteristic. The notable exception were his eyes, focused and sharp enough to cut. 

A clear sense of danger shivered along Henry’s spine, even though arguably a situation like this was far away from their wildest forecasts of possible traps. 

“Colonel Gansey, yours was a surprising invitation, but it’s a pleasure to meet you...and the rest of your division,” the man said, and even his accent was molded into something so generic that the only thing Henry could guess was that he was a native language speaker of some sort.

“I would say the same, considering that we invited you, but I don’t have a name yet,” Gansey replied, keeping his vanguard position even as they all reshuffled with care behind his back. His voice was different than usual — this was not Colonel Gansey among the Corps, or just-Gansey with them, this was _the General’s son_. 

“You can call me Mr Grey.”

“I suppose,” Gansey considered, looking at him carefully up and down. If it was inherently uncomfortable to have this man know him and retain only a nickname in return, Gansey showed no outward signs of it. “Mr Grey, we’ve come to bargain information. It’s our understanding that you have insights on Artemus’s encryption.”

Mr Grey eyed him back with a blink, slow like the one of a panther. “This is surprisingly forward, for Astrid Gansey’s son. I was expecting half an hour of dancing around each other.”

“I don’t have half an hour, and if I did that’s not how I would prefer to spend it.”

There was a grin at this, or maybe it was just the lighting, because a fraction of a second later it was gone. “Very well, whoever pointed you in this direction might have not been wrong and I could have something in this regard. But I hope you understand that this is a highly prized information and I won’t forfeit it easily.”

Gansey stood perfectly straight and perfectly alert, a true king leading his war campaign from the first line. “We have a track of some movements of Barrington Whelk and his cohorts in the last few years. Would that be of interest, Mr Grey?”

And this, monumentally, was called a bluff. 

Of everything they had found — and they had found things of interest — nothing had a clear signature, let alone the one of a man that might very well be dead. But this had been Adam’s contribution to the plan, after having mulled over Henry, Blue and Gansey’s recollections of their meeting with Seondeok. While they probed over possible approaches to this very encounter, Adam had declared they should just bolden up and take some outrageous interpolation around known facts. _We don’t care if it’s not true_ , Adam had said, with something profoundly wicked in the twist of his smile, _Just make it believable._

Gansey had been deeply charmed by the possibility. Now, he pulled it as if it was the purest distilled truth ever spoken, and while Henry tended to think he was good at recognising liars, he also had to admit that someone must have wiped Gansey clean of any telling signs of _bullshit_ a long time ago.

Unfortunately, that appeared to be true also for this mysterious man, who ostentatiously wore the face of someone who had not changed an expression in the last fifteen years. Nevertheless, he said, “That would be suitable, we can discuss it.” 

Henry had a hard time not drawing a long, inappropriate sigh of relief. 

The sentiment had evidently been way too early for what ended up being the reality of the negotiations, though. 

With only the background sound of the pouring rain coming from the outside, Gansey and the Grey Man talked, and talked, and talked some more, testing and prodding each other. In a different situation, Henry would have given them a pair of sticks and asked them to spar it off — it would have been a much more efficient form of conversation. And instead they were stuck here, as the night progressed, so long that even the edge of nervousness that had characterised all of them started to shift into a different shape. 

Testing how factual each other’s material was without actually disclosing any of it seemed to be the most lengthy process. The layering of it almost made Henry’s head hurt — and, as a consequence, made him worry that _Gansey’s_ head would hurt soon, if it wasn’t already. But Gansey gave no signs of it, gaze forward and voice steady. Henry did not know if he should praise himself and Blue for having stabilised whatever Doomsday had left in Gansey’s mind, or just spare a thought of General Astrid Gansey and her habit of raising politicians rather than children.

“So tell me, Colonel,” Mr Grey said, at a certain point. The conversation must have been taking, in some way, because he had walked off the wrapped counter. “What do you expect me to be able to provide you? Mysterious non-digital notebooks? A hard drive that the Corps missed?”

Gansey lifted his right eyebrow only — an expression both he and Helen shared, and that perfectly mirrored their mother’s. “I’m perfectly confident we have everything. But I expect you, Mr Grey, to have _a key_.”

“A key,” the man repeated, putting a great display in amusement. “If you believe you have the data already, why haven’t you cracked it open already?”

“Because cryptography is a subtle art and Artemus was a subtle person, and I never crash through any door I can crack open,” Gansey argued. 

“That’s a bold statement, for someone who walks around with Colonel Lynch.” Mr Grey tilted his head towards Ronan, still covering the rear of their little arrangement.

“Do you want me to crack you open? Because we can fucking arrange it,” Ronan snarled back, without missing a beat, but shut up neatly when Gansey raised a hand.

It was a very kingly gesture, and a perfect display of control. Even Henry, who knew perfectly well Gansey and Ronan’s reciprocal arrangement was more complex than blind obedience, could not help but being vaguely impressed.

“Very well,” the man continued, as if nothing had happened, and it was impossible to discern if he was more amused than before or less. “Let’s say I have this key. If I provide it to you I want access to the outcome, enough to answer some of my questions.”

“That’s not going to be feasible,” Gansey replied without hesitation. “We’re already trading classified information, you can have what we offer as we take what _you_ offer, or we keep what we have and leave.”

It rang with the elegance of an ultimatum, and with four people to back Gansey up there was a clear undertone that they _would_ get out, by whatever means necessary.

Gansey would get like this, at times — so eloquent, laying waste even when armoured only of carefully pronounced syllables. Amazing to witness in every sense , especially for Henry who had spent years stumbling even in the most relaxed verbal exchanges on a bad day.

Mr Grey tilted his head minutely, barely a gesture — and yet none of them had spent years in a military environment to turn out incapable of catching small clue. And this clue, in particular, spoke of _threat_. 

They did not look at each other — they would not, it would be a tell for this chilling stranger to exploit — but Henry could taste the nervousness around him nonetheless.

“Another bold statement; you’re truly your mother’s son.” Somehow, that didn’t fully sound like a compliment. “What tells you for sure that you can walk into a negotiation and call it off just like that? There are _expectations_ in these kind of games, Colonel.”

There would also be consequences for failing to comply with the expectations, and in this specific case, there was no need or space to ask for the details.

Henry found himself walking closer to Gansey, but he was not the only one. Blue was right beside him, and from the other side Adam and Ronan were closing ranks as well. 

Together, or not at all. 

Gansey took a couple of seconds to actually formulate a reply, this time, but when he spoke — surrounded by fellow pilots — his voice was only sharper. “If the negotiation turns into a blackmail I will be sure to follow the example of Noah Czerny.”

More than a bluff, this was a blatant bet — one that they had not discussed in any form before.

But Gansey had tossed it in the playing field and there was no taking it back, no matter how the sharpness in this stranger in grey only escalated. 

“Are you really sure you can handle this twist, Colonel?” Mr Grey asked, deceptively rhetorical. He took one step forward, slow and measured. “What if it makes you look like someone who can actually provide answers on Czerny? What if it makes your negotiation look like a trap set for your counterpart?”

“That…” Gansey started, understanding perfectly well the undertone that this man was _not_ a man who would react nicely to cornering.

“What...” Mr Grey proceeded, talking over Gansey in a voice that thinned at every step that brought him to stand in front of them. In front of Gansey, so close that all of them were ready for the ball to drop into a violent escalation. “What, Colonel, if Noah Czerny is dead and whatever example you think you’re following is just leading you to the same destiny?”

Henry had never been on the receiving end of a death threat, but what he just heard disturbingly sounded like one.

For a second he was absolutely certain that Ronan was going to jump forwards and try to maul the man for the implication. Then, breaking every established rhythm, the voice of a woman came from what had appeared to be just a scaffolding.

“That’s enough, Dean, I think you’ve proven your point.” There was a shuffling of plastic, and a figure slid through all the coverings to come into the light. “And they proved theirs, with the nice reassurance that we don’t have a whole team of moles in the base.”

Maura Sargent approached them with impressive nonchalance, dressed in civilian clothes that were almost too colourful for the grim atmosphere that had settled in the room. Her posture and the neat way her long, black hair was knotted tight behind her head were, however, unmistakable.

Gansey in particular knew her well enough that her sudden appearance made him swallow thickly, the first real sign of distress to signal what might lay underneath his façade. 

The situation became even more surreal when Mr Grey actually stepped away from them, retreating to go closer to Maura without a word of complaint. 

Blue, who so far had been just tensely silent, gasped with something that sounded like outrage — and one did not need to be Henry to understand why.

“Did you set this whole thing up?” Blue asked, gritting her teeth reflexively.

“Funny question. I might ask all of you just the same thing, didn’t you work hard and with a lot of help to get here?” Maura replied, in a peculiar mixture of calm and sarcastic. 

The mention of the help broke Gansey’s silence too, “Did Helen tell you about all this?”

Maura rolled her eyes at this point, not really fed up but clearly puzzled by the approach, “Kids, you came around to bargain and then it becomes an after-lesson Q&A? That’s how it works?” These questions, too, were rhetorical. “Dean told me.”

This was somehow more surprising than any other option Maura could have offered for her presence. Henry blinked in looking between her and Dean, but there was no clear explanation by just the look of them.

“Ma’am, I don’t understand,” Adam was the one to ask, at the end. He was rigid but stoic in facing whatever unforeseen avalanche this might represent. “Was this a trap? A trick?”

“Neither, just a combination of factors,” Maura replied, patiently accepting yet another question.

Ronan’s voice followed over when she was barely done talking, more growling than speaking, “And how long was this hide-and-seek shitshow supposed to go on for? Were you even planning on telling us at all?”

“I’m telling you now, am I not?” Maura kept going from placid to mocking in the span of two adjacent sentences — a habit it seemed. “You went behind my back with whatever led to this. I wouldn’t have known in time without Dean, and you kickstarted this whole conversation by offering Corps intel to a stranger. I have charged people for treason and insubordination for _far less._ ”

The picture from Maura’s eyes was vivid enough that it was impossible for them not to freeze all the way over at it. They had not considered martial court over this issue, but it would be difficult to defend their position if it came down to it — which was partially the reason they had not done everything out in the open.

“We understand, we really understand,” Henry rushed to say, feeling every second of silence ticking directly into his brain with an aftertaste of _guilt_ that they should probably not be showing. “We really understand, but if you thought we had a mole, and _we_ thought we had a mole I think you can see how we ended up here.”

He tried for measured but he felt far from eloquent, especially in the juxtaposition of Gansey interceding for them in the last hour. It was always so much easier in the drift, rich with better ideas than what Henry actually conveyed out loud.

Blue seemed to get Henry’s meaning perfectly, but she built on it with the delicateness of a wrecking ball, staring at her mother and Mr Grey accusatory. “And maybe we can’t claim we don’t have a mole but it seems to me that with so many secrets you _make_ a mole without planting it.”

Maura raised both eyebrows in a clear reproach, but surprisingly a breathy laugh from the man — Dean — cut through the conversation before it could escalate. “She does sound like you when she’s cross.”

“I’m not gonna take it as a compliment,” Maura warned him, moving her stare to him without softening her scowl.

“I wouldn’t think so,” Mr Grey admitted. “But she’s not totally wrong, they weren’t totally wrong.”

“So you’re jumping ship after grilling them? Interesting,” Maura countered, but she did not seem to be really defending the opposite corner of opinion. “What was the plan after this, Gansey?”

Gansey was kind of obviously falling into the habit of posturing for attention in front of a superior, but Henry could sense him thinking, hard enough to set himself back on his feet. “Gather enough evidence to be able to broach the subject with you and Declan _without_ risking treason charges. Work on unlocking Artemus’s archives, particularly focusing on the Dreamcatcher technology and possible telling signs of the Fox’s core. Make use of the embezzled intel to chase the thieves, while hoping that putting other people like Mr Grey on the pursuit would increase the pressure.”

With her arms crossed over her chest, Maura hummed in a way that made her sound like an academy examiner — the whole thing was getting a marked feeling of a didactic exercise, to be honest. 

“What did I tell you,” she asked, rather than ‘grading’ Gansey’s performance, “while Operation Collision for the Fox and Greywaren was starting, before calling your copilots?”

Gansey looked down at this, avoiding Henry and Blue’s questioning looks. “That you would deal with things, and you were still my Lieutenant General, ma’am.”

Maura barely nodded in acknowledgement, “For as much as I understand your reservations, I was dealing with this too.”

“I hope we didn’t compromise the operations,” Gansey took the obvious deduction, looking castigated.

A long inhale followed, sounding a bit like a concession. “It was a well-constructed plan and I don’t resent you for taking charge when I urged you to, Dick,” the use of the nickname, the _family_ nickname, shifted the tone of the conversation. “And I won’t deny that your little _interference_ actually got us a piece of the puzzle that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.”

It was Henry’s turn to lower his eyes, because Seondeok had promised that she would pull some strings and the strings had evidently brought them where they needed to be.

“Does that mean we have what we need for the cryptography, ma’am?” Adam dared to ask, gingerly. 

“Yes, and it also means we’re going forward more or less with Gansey’s plan over here, because evidently I like to encourage recklessness,” Maura admitted, with a huff that for some reason made Mr Grey smile again — a weird concession of expressiveness for someone who had the ability to stay still, silent, and blank enough to merge into the background. 

“So what was this guilt-trip crap for?” Ronan charged up, almost bodily, if not for Gansey literally extending an arm sideways to make clear where the path forward stopped. “We got you what you wanted, more than you wanted, while everything is going to shit, and we also take the damn _scolding_ for it?”

“It’s dangerous and I have all the right to be worried that you’ll detonate more mines in the field than you can actually see,” Maura argued, evidently used to Ronan’s flare-ups in whichever way they could come. 

“You think I don’t fucking know it?! They killed my father!”

It was loud enough to ring empty in the room, and when it was over Ronan’s heavy breathing kept dragging along — a blatant crack into the façade of a perfect soldier devoted to the mission because the mission was all that was left. Gansey’s hand gripped tight on the fabric of Ronan’s coat, and it looked more like he was holding Ronan up than keeping him back, now.

“I know, Ronan,” Maura was so much softer now she might as well be another person. “I know, and I don’t want them to take you too…and we all saw they tried already.”

Ronan recoiled back, snatching himself away from Gansey’s hand. It must be a statement to the weight of Maura in this whole ranked family system, if there were no profanities to follow.

“I knew Artemus well enough to have half a grasp on what his work might entail, even though it’s not factual enough to be of any real help for Declan,” Maura continued, with another heavy sigh. “If we can’t unlock the drivers and no one else can either, we’re on safer playing ground than going to gather all the pieces and have them snatched away.”

“Like Fox,” Adam whispered.

It was not such a crazy picture, even less so when a good three-quarters of their preparation while in transport had been _how do not fall into a trap 101._

“But now we have the pieces, because...Mr Grey, or whatever...will give us the key,” Blue whispered, still frowning over the whole scenario. She all but glared to this stranger who acted like he routinely got away with murder. “Won’t he?”

“I will, Major, and I’ll also admit I wouldn’t have recovered it if you didn’t nudge the unmovable Seondeok into action,” Mr Grey spoke again, when directly addressed. It was a casual but blatant way to address how they all seemed to know each other on this underground network that Henry and all the other pilots were just beginning to poke around with. The man’s overwhelmingly calm eyes moved from Blue to Gansey, pointedly, “And you can trust me when I say, I’m very good at playing push and pull; I’ll be good at putting pricks in the backs of some people about the embezzlements also.”

Even though that had been the substance of Gansey’s plan, as promised, Henry could not help but wonder if the pricks in the backs were going to be _literal_.

He refused to shiver and asked, just in confirmation. “So we’re going forward, all of us, with Gansey’s plan.”

“Hoping very much we won’t regret it, yes,” Maura confirmed. 

In contrast with the beginning of this evening, Henry knew at a skin-deep level that this concession in particular did not call for any type of relief.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Pointless worries were not one of the many quirks and twists Gansey had learned to associate with Maura Sargent, Lieutenant General and ruler of the unruly. 

Therefore, if she was worried, he was worried. He had been worried from the very moment she had appeared in that remote bar in Sanya, and he had remained worried since. The sensation had run deep enough to spread to Henry and Blue through the drift, when they actually went on that pseudo-decoy mission that they organised — and in turn Gansey collected their tensions, and all the stratified family issues that came with it. 

It made him wonder what would be of his relationship with the two of them, if they had not met in the final aftershocks of an apocalyptic war. For as much as they talked about an _after_ — a legendary creature they often sought comfort in — the very essence of their stability seemed to come from urgency and dramatic pressure, and the way they clicked depended intensely on what came _before_. Even more terrifying was the thought that Gansey would have not been able to understand the nuances of Blue and Henry’s characters without the drift. How could he have untangled the depths of Henry’s anxious mind alone, his joy and his terror so mingled together? How to shoulder Blue’s constant judgment, pungent like spikes and slippery like water, without knowing how deeply she cared and feeling her struggle to not feel inadequate with the rest of the world?

Those were unwarranted, useless thoughts, but they were still there — and it was almost comforting to have them, in the _status quo._

The only thing Gansey insistently tried to keep off the drift was the fear that chained to the _after_ — that dread that he would stop understanding them, and they would stop understanding him, and that he would get to the after only to be left alone in it. 

As with most of Gansey’s worries, it promised to keep him awake at night. 

Their retinue had reentered into the Hong Kong Shatterdome seven hours before and in theory, after the travel, this was the only allotted moment for sleep on steady ground. In ten hours, Maura would call them all after having talked with Helen and Declan privately, and they would have to see the results of what they urged into motion. 

Inevitably, Gansey reacted to the countdown by wandering around the base, leaving Henry and Blue in a bed that was barely big enough for two but still somehow had enough space to fit three. 

Going to knock at Ronan’s door was the obvious move after stepping into the hallway. Ronan was probably going to be restless, resentful. Maybe Artemus was the key to understanding everything that had happened — and thus they should have tried to unlock the drivers right after Doomsday. Maybe it would not be, it would be just an additional problem with some guidance. Either way, Ronan was probably going to take it badly. Gansey did not resent him for this — they were bred for the kind of conflict that came with brutal battles, not with the attrition of waiting and waiting and waiting. 

But there was no reply at Ronan’s door — or Niall’s, for the record — so Gansey redirected his restless energy into looking for him in reachable plausible places.

He did not know what led him to use the upper entrance door to the training room. The only reasoning was that it was closer to the path Gansey had taken, and that Ronan would often brood on the higher benches of the bleachers.

Inside, the lights were fully on and it felt like a measure of success. The door slid shut behind him, and the subdued sound of it was promptly covered by blunt thumping. Gansey had been smashed on the ground of the sparring rings too many times in his life to not recognise the sound of it. Another thump came right after.

By the time Gansey had actually focused on the scene, Ronan laid with his side to the floor, and he must have maneuvered to drag Adam down because Adam was precariously hanging by his sides, their sticks crossed. 

“Are we done?” Adam asked, his voice carrying in the emptiness of the room. 

Ronan let go of the stick, letting himself flop down completely on the floor. Adam set down the weapon just as quickly, taking the cue without needing words. The distance between them was different, organic as if the very air they breathed kept them in tune. When Adam sat on the floor, Ronan took his hand without having to look at it, holding it at the centre of his chest as it rose and fell rapidly. 

Gansey didn’t mean to _spy_ , but he could not stop himself from looking. He knew so many facets of Ronan, but not _this one_ — because this one had not existed before Adam.

“What if we don’t have a single mess but ten different connected messes and unlocking the cryptography on that shit doesn’t tell us anything?” Ronan asked, expressing to the ceiling exactly what Gansey had predicted. 

“It will tell us something, even if it’s just one mess out of the ten,” Adam declared, and he did not seem prone to empty reassurances so he must be fairly certain of it. “And I mean, we saw Gansey the other day, he’s gonna run someone over to find this answer.”

At the very far end of the bleachers, Gansey had wanted to make his presence known — or make himself scarce — but hearing his name in a conversation between third parties made an unavoidable type of curiosity spark in his mind. He was tense, for a moment, profoundly aware of all the things Ronan might blame him for, rightfully or not. 

Instead, Ronan just laughed under his breath. “He is, isn’t he? He’ll fuck the rest of the world up, holding the ground for me, but also for you, and for Cheng and the maggot.”

Gansey would. He very much would. He had missed having a whole group, and somehow they were clustering back together. Five was not the seven they had used to be, but it was enough to feel in battle. And Ronan, constantly by his side since the very beginning, _knew_.

“Want to go and talk to him?” Adam suggested, making Gansey stiffen in his spot. To Ronan’s hard-suffering snort, conveying a sort of non-descript protest, Adam amended with, “Yes, I mean, go kick down his door and ask something crazy.”

“That’s not what I do!” Ronan protested, though Gansey knew it to be _exactly_ like something Ronan would do.

“That’s what you did with me,” Adam said, with the same measured tone he used for everything. But the fringes of it were softer, his hand still surely in Ronan’s grasp.

“Fuck off,” Ronan rebutted, but did not push him off or let him go. “I’ll bring him out for a drive with the can filled with nitroglycerine and you won’t be invited.”

Something in Ronan’s expression must telegraph Adam that Ronan was _not_ joking or expressing wishful thinking. “Gansey?” Adam just asked, dubious. 

Up in his eavesdropping spot, Gansey himself stood awkwardly, guilty of being exactly the type of person that would be up for this brand of Ronan’s madness. He would not know how to explain it to Adam, who knew something different of him.

Ronan just said, “Yeah, ‘cause he’s not a spoilsport like you losers.”

It made Gansey’s chest thrum with a convoluted type of emotion. Their world was going forward, with more novelty than Gansey knew how to handle, and they reached in the dark. But nothing and no one would ever take the place Ronan-and-Gansey had in the framework of their existence.

“I’ll drag him off to it...once we know what we’re doing,” Ronan whispered in addition. 

It was a promise Gansey was not supposed to witness. A good promise, one he would look forward to more than he did for the next crazy twist of events. 

Gansey rubbed on his face, silently. When he looked back down, Ronan was still on the floor with this impossible creature named Adam Parrish, who traded with Gansey’s best friend — _his brother-in-arms_ — in a foreign currency. A part of Gansey wanted to study them until he gained full understanding of this Ronan. But then Adam murmured something, and Ronan tugged at Adam’s hand, bringing him closer.

Gansey was sure they were going to kiss, just as they had been doing in the shower rooms.

He turned around and took his leave.

The way back to the pilots’ quarters felt faster than getting to the training room had been, as if the space itself had morphed or time had shrunk to play a trick on Gansey’s already confused mind. 

He thought it would get better in familiar, controlled space, but with his back to the closed door and facing the room he had lived in for the last few years, the sense of _otherness_ did not completely abate. Maybe it was not that he did not know his surroundings enough — he just did not know anything _apart_ from them, and getting drunk on novelties for the last few months did not mean _having something new_.

At the end, it was the light coming from the connecting door — open, always open — that drove him towards comfort like a moth to the flame. Or a moth to a lightbulb, maybe, because he knew this would not hurt.

“Why are you not sleeping?” Helen asked, as soon as he walked over the door frame. She was sitting at her desk with no less than four tablets around her, and did not even turn around to look at Gansey. Still, she was not ignoring him.

“Too many things happening?” Gansey could not help the interrogative tone, like a pupil caught guessing on the answer.

Helen snorted softly, but there was some indulgence in her tone. “Lay down on the bed, and I’ll be working over here, okay?” she said, finally turning on her chair to look at her brother.

Gansey looked back, in a silent catalogue of Helen’s aspect. She had bags under her eyes for lack of sleep and her hair could use another cut, but the scars left after Doomsday were finally starting to disappear from her normal complexion. Being behind closed doors meant Helen would dress for comfort only, and her tank top put a wild evidence to the prosthetic arm. Even the points of connection between metal and flesh were less of an angry red, and the arm actually followed her in her movements instead of limping heavily to the side as it had done in the first couple of weeks. 

This too, was changing, moving forward towards some kind of future.

Gansey could have asked her what she was working on so intensely, now. He could have apologised, just in case, for how it went with Mr Grey, because she did not seem cross or in trouble but maybe there was more. More than anything, he could have talked to her about the concept of _after_ , of how to actually move with the flow instead of getting dragged out half-unwilling, half-confused.

He could have, and she would have talked to him about it for hours.

Somehow, the possibility was enough.

Gansey took off his shoes and went to lay on her bed, the silence broken only by the whispering of fabric. He turned on his side, Helen’s desk in view, and did not protest the day-mode of the lights. Only when he was settled, Helen smiled with an half-approving hum, and turned around in her chair.

Under the interspersed tapping of Helen’s fingers on her tablets, Gansey closed his eyes.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“What do you mean, a biomarker?” Blue asked, barely waiting for Declan to finish talking.

It was not particularly surprising that someone like Declan Lynch, carrying the same asshole gene that must run in the family, would not like to be interrupted. “What could I _possibly_ mean by biomarker, Major Sargent?” 

His sarcasm in response still managed to irk Blue, already on edge by virtue of being in a room packed with too many high-ranking officials. She sat between Henry and Adam, right behind Ronan and Gansey, and way too squarely in the line of sight of Helen, Maura and Calla. The chairs were arranged casually around a metal bench cluttered with electronic, and they had to carefully avoid crossing the cables that led off from there and disappeared in which looked like a server room. Overall, this was the furthest thing from a meeting room, but Declan still managed to behave as though he were giving a keynote to an international audience.

“I wouldn’t know, Doctor, maybe that we’re in trouble if at the end of the day the hard drives can only be unlocked by a person that is _actually dead_?” she bit back, and though Calla seemed to be a bit amused both she and Maura shook their head slightly. At least Blue could hear Ronan snort, even though that was not much of a support overall.

“I see you’re assuming that I don’t have Artemus’s biosignature to at least do a test. And the assumption is wrong,” Declan notified them, with an unimpressed lift of his eyebrows.

The thought of this person, dead after purposely contaminating himself with Kaiju material, having enough biological material around for the RDI department to do _testing_ was disturbing at best.

“This is a damn dystopia…” Blue uttered. A dystopia she had been participating in for the better part of the last decade and that she was not about to leave.

“Can we go back a step?” Helen asked, with that tone of question that was not fully a question. “The last element that we recovered is a crypto-key decoder, but the additional security goes with biomarkers?” 

“Yes, I set up the whole interface,” Declan confirmed, more agreeable towards Helen, maybe just in light of the fact that she always seemed competent. Or that her arm was his little side project, according to Gansey. “I’m confident it would work, but we need the key to the key, if you get what I mean.”

Blue looked more carefully at the bench, distrustful of anything on it. It looked like a miniature Mayan temple — if Mayan temples came with electronics, data storage, processors, and a bundle of cables connecting everything in a cascade of wiring. At the very top, there was the piece Mr Grey had recovered following Seondeok’s directions, and forfeited to them in Sanya in exchange for all the embezzling intel. 

There was something disturbingly toy-like about it and if someone had handed it to Blue telling her it was a magic-box for a child to play with she would have believed them. All the faces of the cubes were covered with little squares, and all the letters in them were in shambles. Only the two sides that had opened for Declan to manage the connection had some squares with a discernible meaning.

Dreamtree, to the right. Lily, to the left. 

It made Blue’s stomach queasy, for some irrational reason.

“And Artemus’s biomarkers were useless on it?” Maura asked, with a careful tone, scrutinising the box. 

Blue did not like that tone. It was a tone that suggested _secrets_ , and it felt too late for secrets — even though it was exactly the right time, in a now-or-never sort of way.

Declan thinned his lips, pensive. “Not exactly, I did get a partial signal, but it seems to be impossible to trace it back and maybe force to match perfectly.”

Maura hummed, and she and Calla exchanged a private look. 

Very little of this was casual, even less considering how carefully Maura had directed them around. She had been there with Mr Grey, claiming that she had been working on cracking this puzzle for longer than the five of them had. She had called this rendezvous at a seemly random time, but evidently it was just long enough to allow Declan to work on it. Finally, Blue was fairly certain this server room in the RDI division building, free from any marks on the door and enclosed in metal walls thicker than most, was actually a blind spot for all the comms.

Still in a silent exchange that reminded the whole room that the two of them had been drifting for years, Maura and Calla got closer to what looked like a resolution. Calla shrugged, with a hand gesture that seemed to say, _be my guest_ , and Maura sighed, before getting up.

“Very well,” she said, _non sequitur_. “Declan...without _arguing_ , if you can...test the signal response with Calla, and then with me.”

Declan must have been severely tempted to comment or protest, but Maura looked him up and down and he averted his gaze with just a “Ma’am, yes, ma’am.” 

Blue was starting to suspect that certain Lynch-responses could be predicted like clockwork, in spite of how chaotic they appeared to be. She was not so reproachful over not having a chance to meet Niall Lynch, after all.

Both Calla and Maura were taller than Blue, but they both had to stand on the metal bench, combat boots and uniform and all, to be able to reach the toy-box. The cube was dark, and the lighting of the room less than optimal, but there must be a clear indication of what to do, at least for the two of them. 

Calla touched it at the two sides, fingers spread and expression too rigid — almost disgusted, Blue would have said. They all remained very silent, and in front of her Gansey reshuffled rigidly on his chair, but as the seconds ticked by and nothing happened, the tension defused.

“No signal variation, Calla.” Declan reported. Then, tentatively, he continued, “I mean, if I may, I tried myself before...just in case Artemus thought of leaving me something to succeed him…”

“But it wasn’t you either,” Maura finished for him, a bit brutal but effective, which was the family trait. 

“Then is this really just locked for Artemus biosignature?” Gansey attempted, way more courteous than Blue had been with her assumptions before. It was not surprising, he was never as unrepentant as Blue liked him at his best, among members of the Old Guard of pilots.

“No, I don’t think so,” Maura cut off, and this was less called for.

She was angry, Blue realised belatedly. A bit too belatedly, maybe, but she was more used to gauging her mother’s mood from a video call than in person. Calla had taken her hands off the box, but they stood next to each other, even though there was no apparent reason to stay there together — none, apart from Calla not wanting to leave Maura angry and alone near a table full of delicate electronics.

Maura did not address anything more of the whole procedure, keeping her thoughts squarely for herself. She just reached over and planted her hands exactly where Calla’s had been.

Blue stared at her, at this mother that wasn’t the one she had grown up with as a kid but neither was a total stranger, trying to divine what about a box could make her angry. And then she stared more, because something _whirred_.

“That’s…” Declan started, uncharacteristically hesitant for someone normally so bossy. “That’s the same amount of response I had using Artemus’s biomarkers. On a...different channel, though, and still not optimal. Maybe if we combine we could get a full outcome.”

Maura snatched her hands off the box.

“Motherfucker…” Calla hissed. For as much as Blue would be in favour of insulting Declan Lynch, she could guess he was not the object of Calla’s scorn.

Her mother stayed silent for long enough that both Henry and Gansey turned to look at Blue, evidently concerned. She could only thin her lips at them, just as confused, just as off track.

“Declan,” Maura said again. Lower, slower. “From your and Helen’s estimation, what are we likely to find in the drivers?”

It was Declan and Helen’s turn to look at each other — not the way that two pilots looked at one another, more like two colleagues with a shared track of work. Declan eyed the five of them, young and mostly newcomers to the base, but then sighed when Helen clicked her tongue in disbelief.

“Most of the Dreamcatcher development, for sure, which I hope will give me a way to figure out a protocol to fix something that never broke before,” Declan admitted, starting from what was evidently the key point for him. “I say it because every reference I can find in non-encrypted files brings me back to the archives. And apart from that, I assume details on core-drift interface because...you know, we never knew how Artemus did what he did during Doomsday.”

It was a lot, obviously. 

Blue was exchanging some looks with her boys — all four of them — over the monumental Mayan pyramid they had in front, when Maura interrupted their train of thought before it could start.

“How does that sound? All of this?” 

“Like something we really need?” Ronan replied in a rush, without checking if he had been really addressed. 

Maura did not seem cross, and it was not surprising given the exchange they had in Sanya. Still, she looked at all of them, one by one, and they took it as a cue to give a personal response.

“It’s the final blueprint, basically,” Adam said, taking a practical approach. 

“The line that connects the dots, I don’t know?” Henry provided, right after.

“Something that would actually level the field,” Gansey sighed a bit, tactical in a slightly too emotional way.

When Maura looked at Blue, it was longer, more pointed. Blue almost wanted to challenge her over what Maura needed her opinion for, in a room full of the best and brightest the Headquarter had to offer. At the end, she did not.

“More,” she replied. “More answers, fewer secrets, it’s about time if we actually want to _conclude_ something.”

It was too verbose in comparison to the others, but that did not seem to be what left Maura more quiet.

“Get up, then. Come here,” she said. 

This time, it sounded more like a suggestion and less like an order. It reminded Blue of the mother from her childhood, skeptical over imposed discipline before the war required something different from Maura and her ideals. But this time, for once, the tone was not the critical aspects.

“What?” Blue breathed out, batting her eyes.

Apart from the hum of the high voltage current around them, the room was now dead silent.

“This isn’t a game I wanted to play, but it seems we’re cornered and so I have to,” Maura said, and it felt like an introduction to something _dire_. “If you really think what you said, come up and we can unlock the cryptography. If you didn’t mean it…”

“Of course I meant it!” Blue snapped, getting up from her chair but not up on the table. “How do we unlock it?” 

“If it’s not quite Artemus’s biosignature and not quite my biosignature, I think it’s your biosignature.” Maura looked at her in the eyes, from her place on the table. “Artemus was your biological father.”

The room froze in such a deep silent that one might have heard a feather fall to the floor.

Blue’s mouth dried suddenly, and when she swallowed it was against nothing. “Are you kidding me?” she managed to exhale. “You told me you met my father when you were younger.”

“I did,” Maura confirmed, still standing on the table.

“You told me that it didn’t work out but you wanted me so you had me!”

“I very much did, Blue.”

It was too intimate of a conversation to have in front of strangers. But no one in the room felt like a real stranger, in one way or another. Blue had Calla, Gansey, Henry, and then Ronan and Adam,who she would trust with her life. Maura had Calla, but in every way it counted Ronan, Declan, Helen and Gansey were a family for her too. And in the heat of the moment, Blue was not sure she would have cared about who listened to their ridiculous family drama. 

“I’m twenty, Mum! Twenty! That means that you knew him all my life, and you spent ten years with him _here_ and you sent me to _fucking Los Angeles_!” Blue yelled without trying to restrain herself.

“And he still managed to encode your biosignature into a classified hell that people would kill for, for _fuck’s sake_!” Maura yelled back, a crack in that barely contained anger that Blue had seen before. 

They were not usually prone to profanity. Or yelling. Or overdramatic discussions. Blue usually held the drama, if she felt so inclined, and Maura, or Persephone, or Calla held the cryptic words of wisdom. It was like a whiplash with a recoil and they both stopped. The rest of the room might as well be filled with status, for how silent everyone was.

Blue did say she wanted more answer. And she also said she wanted less secrets.

This Mayan pyramid held them both with the deviousness of a double-edged sword.

With her lips in a thin line, she stepped on the chair and then on the metal bench, and marched towards were Maura was still standing.

“Blue, listen…” Calla tried to interject.

Blue did not listen. 

The toy-box of questionable paternal instinct did not appear less crazy up close, but the ridges between the squares full of letters were more clear. Between them, in particular, there were five ovals for every side, a perfect match for a total of ten fingertips.

Without saying a word, Blue reached up tensing on her tiptoes and smashed her hands on the cubes.

As soon as her fingertips slid into position she could feel pricking at the sides of it, like tiny needles. It was less intense than a Jaeger’s handles but something of the invasiveness reminded her of it. The pulse of her heart pressed against her eardrums in fury — one, two times, as nothing happened. 

Then she heard a whirring, with the slightest vibration under her hands. 

That was the most warning she got before the box started to heat up. 

Blue snatched her hands away just in time, as the ridges of the cube started glowing of a light blue that definitely reminisced of a Jaeger and its shell. The whirring intensified, like hundreds gears turning against each other, but there was also a low clattering as the letters on the surface started to reshuffle. They seemed to run through a whole alphabet, several alphabets even, but at the end they started to converge.

_Lily. Lily._

_Blue._

_Blue. Blue. Lily._

_Blue. Lily. Lily. Blue._

It was fascinating and vaguely sickening at the same time, like dreaming of an alluring stranger calling you in weird nicknames and waking up with chills down your spine. Only this time, there was no moment of discontinuity.

One after the other, the servers lit up. The various computers Declan had connected to the monumental system came out of standby, with system windows popping all over the place in an invasion of black and white and running writing.

“Mary Mother of Jesus _fuck_ ,” Declan hissed, in a very Lynch heartfelt reaction.

Amidst the military-contained chaos, Blue looked down at her hands. They were relatively unscarred, but her fingertips were tingling as if she had pressed them on something hot, even though she had not burned herself. At the side of each finger there were small wounds, some still red with blood, as if the box had bitten into her. Something about it really reminded Blue of the drifting interface — but of course, it was just a box, and her mind was her own to mull over the turn of events she had kicked into action.

“Are we up? You got everything?” She asked, gaze still lowered and hoping that someone in the room will catch the prompt to answer.

“Yes, the...yes...the drivers are unlocked, the data mining is active, it will of course be a lengthy business…” Declan started replying, and his own voice faded off into the fuzziness of Blue’s brain.

“Great, golden, go team,” she flopped her arms down to the side and went to go off the useless stage that the metal table created in the middle of the room. “Can we talk?”

The Hong Kong Shatterdome seemed to call for these sorts of sentences. In this case, Blue did not have to address the question to anyone in particular for Maura to follow her back to the floor like a normal human being. 

Blue started to walk off without waiting for a reply. In her path, she could feel Henry and Gansey’s eyes on her in a different way from all the others — caring, worried, and _unique_. She brushed both their shoulders in a mild reassurance and recognition. It was only on her way out that she distractedly worried that she might have left some blood on their uniform, even though it did not particularly matter. 

Out in the hallway, Maura was beside her quickly even though she had not replied in any way to Blue’s question in the room, nor she directly addressed it now. Maybe it was because of the rarity of an outright, immediate request to address an issue. Blue was willing to blame Gansey growing on her, because a rational, more cynical part of her knew that talking was not going to change anything.

“Can you tell me about it?” she asked, instead, so vague to be infuriating for herself first and foremost.

Maura did not seem cross with her, though, and she always seemed to understand what she wanted to know before Blue knew it herself. They kept walking, which gave Blue an amazing excuse for not having to look at her, but it felt private nonetheless.

“We met back in Virginia, exactly where you were born, because Artemus had started working for a military facility there,” Maura started. 

For how much Blue had always thought stories on how your parents met were idiotic, she wanted _this_ story in particular.

“I would have never pinned you for someone with a military kink,” Blue uttered.

“I’m a Lieutenant General and we practice self-love in this family,” Maura countered, with enough self-irony to make even Blue smile — even though she remembered, to some degree, her mother before the Corps. “But you’re right, though, I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t, until I did, and the way I justified it to Aunt Jimi when she called me out on it was that Artemus wasn’t a soldier. He was a scientist. And he talked like one, he sounded like one.”

Blue had always prided herself on being a down-to-earth and practical person. Her mother was an adult, and an attractive woman. If Blue could recognise everything that there was to be loved about her then obviously the rest of the world would, too. She never thought she would hear about who _her mother_ loved, though, and that felt fundamentally different for some inexplicable reason.

“It’s not much of a justification, but I was young and he was brilliant. Ambitiously brilliant, world-changingly brilliant.” She seemed to be describing someone more distant than a person that had died a few months ago. A memory that had no place in the more recent past. “For a year or so, he was everything I could have wanted from life. Then he finally finished his funding applications, and my life was projected on other stuff. So you know, burning twice as high and half as long...but when I got pregnant, I realised I wanted a child, who didn’t need to be his child.”

It sounded so easy, so easy, so clear-cut. This was where Blue entered the story without recognising herself in it. But she had always been _“just”_ Maura’s daughter and here, too, that was where she stood.

“He did know, though, right?” Blue asked, looking at Maura in passing and then going back to the hallway floor.

“At this point, we can say definitely,” Maura said, a bit drily. There was no way this game would have worked otherwise, so of course Artemus had known. “But you know, I actually met Calla and Persephone in that same year, because of that same military facility, so I wasn’t alone and there was something very significant out of it.” 

“Oh,” Blue blinked, somehow surprised. It’s not like she did not have the timing, the pieces, from the three of them. They had always been with her, they had always been _together_ through Blue’s life. But this biological father sounded so separate from everything else that she had not realised the obvious connection.

“Was he so deranged you didn’t want me to have anything to do with him? Or did he not want to have anything to do with me?” Blue did her best to put it down evenly, rationally. And yet, cruelly, it was the type of question that would always sound childish and would always make you feel like a child.

“I don’t have a single response to how he was,” Maura admitted, after a second of silence. “You were little, and he was brilliant, but whimsical, and sometimes I wonder if sticking with him a bit longer would have avoided him going a bit manic on his work, but...you know, I wasn’t there to provide distraction, and I much preferred to be there for my daughter. You didn’t need to be at his whims.”

It made so much sense, the same practicality with which all the women in her life had tried to infuse her — all the ones in that busy house they had lived in back in Virginia, and then just Maura and Calla and Persephone, thousands of kilometers away but still making sure that Blue sort of _grew up_ in the middle of the war. She wanted so much to be angry, but it made sense and the _sense_ of it so far was the most frustrating thing of all.

“What about when I was not little?” She asked, when Maura seemed lost in some frowny train of thought and she was not providing more without feedback.

“When you weren’t little, the world was ending,” she summarised, with the ease of a straight-cut line. Maura’s world, like most other people on planet but surely like every person in the Pan Pacific Defence Corps, ran on two lines — before the Kaiju, after the Kaiju. “The thing is...I had some part in some of his crazy ideas, and...it’s not like I would never meet with him sometimes, after, just for a drink as he looked at the world as if he hadn’t been out of the lab in months,” Maura derailed a bit, in a strangely vivid recollection. “And when it was clear that we were at war like never before, Persephone and Calla were sort of dragged back through their connections. And I let myself be dragged too, because...because inaction was not an option.”

“Right,” Blue murmured a bit. Her mother, so heroic, taking a stand because otherwise there would be no more stand to take ever. Blue had always been proud of her, even when she had been bitter about it. “Is this about the prototype thing?”

“It is about the prototype thing,” Maura confirmed, with a little sigh. “I think this new issue...and then Niall tossing even crazier ideas around...kind of gave a different focus to that ‘mad scientist’ energy that Artemus always had.” She scratched her head and this time, when Blue cast her a glance, she was looking down as well. “I was never a fan of what they did to Dick and Ronan, you know? This was a war that we, as adults, were supposed to fight for you, not with you.”

Blue was struggling to see the connection, and also disengage from the current reality enough to put total trust in the narrative. “I joined the Corps too, eventually. I piloted too. You called me here. I think I’m fighting with you all right.”

“You met Seondeok,” Maura said, randomly off from Blue’s accusation. “What did you think of her?”

Blue thinned her lips, “She’s...peculiar. A bit commanding.” 

“And what does Henry think of her?”

That was a more conniving question, one Blue did not have the luxury to lack the answer for. She had been with Henry for so long, and in the drift they had found each other — left behind, spare, a bit broken, a bit handle-with-care — matching in every way that mattered. But this wasn’t Los Angeles anymore, this wasn’t like _before_. Gansey held part of the thread of Blue’s mind, and if she followed what sounded like his inner voice Blue could always found herself more analytical. And it was different with having seen Seondeok from the outside — personal by virtue of being Henry’s mother, but not within Blue’s own family.

Sometimes you do what you have to, and there is no other way.

“That’s Henry’s business, not up for sharing,” Blue replied, instead. But she really suspected Maura would never expect her to break the sacred intimacy of the drift. She probably just wanted Blue to _think_ , and Blue had done just so.

“You’re safer, closer to the eye of the cyclone. Maybe there were other ways, but this is the way I know,” Maura said, skipping along the conversation with prompts that were beyond words. “Do you hate it so much? Being here, the Corps...the cyclone itself.”

The question sounded almost sentimental, and Blue had a little double-take over it, stumbling in her steps down the hallway. Maura stopped and turned fully to face Blue, pausing their aimless wandering around.

“I…” Blue wetted her lips, pressing them together before forcing herself to look back in her mother’s eyes and actually speak some truth into existence. “I think I hate how there never seems to be enough choices to actually _choose_ something, you know? This, or the apocalypse...this, or desertion...It’s not really a choice. But we all have this ‘this, or’ thing, so I prefer the cyclone.” 

It didn’t feel like giving up, more like letting go. And Maura, who was used to the very essence of the drift, smiled with a little understanding nod.

“Was it planned, though?” Blue had to ask, before Maura could flip the conversation in yet another direction. “Me and Henry...and then this thing with Artemus’s drives, even. Did you plan it? Did you suspect it?”

Maura sighed, without real weight in it, “I couldn’t have planned you and Henry, even though the irony of you drifting with Seondeok’s son wasn’t lost on me.” She gave a little wink, and then went serious again. “I suspected Artemus might be up to something, but Artemus was always up for something...more and more through the years. And I’m genuinely sorry for this drama but...between Niall and Artemus, they saved the world.”

Blue had to admire the struggle against some internal degree of hypocrisy, most of all because she struggled with it herself. But just like the mother-son dynamic was more lucid when seen through Henry and Seondeok’s lenses, the tendency towards double standard was better in focus with Maura — who wanted no one to touch her daughter but was also obliged to do what it took, and not waste ten years of effort.

“I don’t think it was quite enough,” Blue shrugged, and turned on her steps. “And I think finishing the rest will be a mess, so I’ll go and help the others with the technological equivalent of a payback for all the missing child support.”

Maura laughed open and shameless, “Oh, Calla is gonna like this one.”

They passed by each other, shoulders nudging. 

A part of Blue was not fully sure yet of what to do with these secrets, these duties, these answers. But among all the possible places on Earth, and among all the possible choices in life, her people and her fight were _here_.

  
  


* * *

  
  


It took the better part of four days and all the intersectional knowledge of the last ten years of war to make sense of Artemus’s archives.

Adam had thought Operation Collision that yielded Raven King and the massive repair of Greywaren were the most monumental projects he had ever been involved in, but this felt fundamental and intellectual in a way that was usually foreign to him. He was too used to being a glorified mechanic, and instead he was being handed engineering, quantum mechanics, physics, and _pure genius_.

Declan had enforced a strict division of duties, on the grounds that there was no way to actually cover all the data in a timely manner otherwise.

“And I need someone to understand what they are looking at or it’s a waste of time that we _don’t_ have,” he had added, commanding not only Gansey but also Adam to work with him on drifting interfaces. 

That had left Adam frankly stunned, which had made Ronan eyeroll very pointedly while pushing him away from his and Helen’s zone — where they were supposed to be working on core mechanics and traceability. “Off to the nerd corner, make him feel too idiotic to live and then report back.”

Henry and Blue were scouring for more detailed information on Manila, on the grounds that Henry was the only one that had been there and Blue had drifted with him for long enough to consider the information equally shared. Maura and Calla would come around and help sometimes, but they took the unenviable duty of settling things with Richard and Astrid Gansey, and of course the rest of the base still required some actual managing.

None of the teams were truly independent or isolated, and they moved back and forth between the three spots they had claimed in the huge server room. They paused twice a day, for one meal outside and some off time they all tended to use to go outside of the buildings of the Shatterdome and shower, but there were several moments of interlude, especially when some of the data mining proved to be very computationally heavy.

“Found him,” Henry said, at some point one morning, pushing the keyboard away from his hands. 

Half a click, and the footage he had been looking at appeared on the sharing screen of the room, high on a wall, for all of them to see.

Henry had stopped the recording on a neat frontal close up of two men in a very rough and older model of a piloting suit. By their estimate neither of them should be older than twenty-five years old, or they would have not been suitable for prototypes. However, one of them had features so large — in eyes, in face, in jawline and shoulders — that he could almost be confused for someone barely of age. The other did not appear much more mature, but he was more slender, with fair hair and a friendly face that was sunken with worry in the specific moment that had been captured in time.

“Barrington Whelk, he was pretty famous at the base,” Henry declared, head tilting towards the man to the right. His and Blue’s research had been tedious because Artemus appeared to never use actual names in his system and they did not have dog tags to refer to, for these people that had been erased by the Corps records.

Adam glanced at Ronan, finding him hyperfocused on the screen, a bit too pale in what was the only telling sign of his stress. “And that…” Ronan gestured to the left, very slowly “...that’s Noah Czerny.”

The memory of the day Niall died was too rough, too layered by shock, so Adam had never been able to pick it up in full from Ronan’s mind. What he knew, though, was that what Ronan saw in the hutch was real. Everyone believed him, but Adam knew. The only person reluctant to embrace a _drift ghost_ had been Declan, whose face mirrored a different uneasiness than his brother. 

“We must be on the right track, then,” Gansey broke the silence only after a while. “Any clarification?”

“I really think there was a testing of Dreamcatcher involved...I mean, a prototype of Dreamcatcher, it doesn’t have a name,” Blue said, scratching her head distractedly. “But I think they were piloting something that was testing the technology, is that possible?”

“Timewise, yes,” Ronan replied, running a hand all along his buzzcut head. He looked tired, and Adam mentally noted to send him off to take a break soon. “Greywaren in Mark-I didn’t have Dreamcatcher, it was part of the 2018 upgrade of the Mark-II series.”

“You think a testing of something like this could be connected to what happened in Manila?” Henry dared to push, eyeing both Ronan and Adam as if they really had the same authority in a reply.

“We don’t even know what the fuck happened in Manila!” Ronan groaned, frustrated. “But yes, Cheng, okay? Frankly yes, at least from a piloting perspective it’s easy to make it go wrong, especially if the system is unbalanced...and I mean, I don’t think the Guinea pig here was optimised like Greywaren is.”

They all winced, to different degrees. It was a brutal way to put it, but it must have rung true for everyone. Manila was a testing ground and at some point the upgrades were tested with actual pilots in interface. In itself, it was not a shocking concept, it was the least Adam would have expected given the investment of an upgrade. But Noah Czerny had died and then appeared seven years later, and that made it inherently more disturbing.

Adam got up before the situation could precipitate, “We’re taking a break, we’ll be back in fifteen.” 

He closed his hand around Ronan’s nape, but there was no need to drag him out. Ronan came willingly enough, though his expression was thunderous. The only three people from the RDI department that crossed them in the hallway made themselves scarce with record timing, clearly sensing trouble. Adam, instead, was close enough that they arms brushed at every step they took, synchronised with mindless ease.

The training rooms would have been excellent, considering the mood, but even reaching them was going to take them more time than the proclaimed break would allow them. Then one of the doors for the internal paths in the hangar caught his attention.

“Follow me,” Adam told Ronan, who wasn’t exactly separating from him either. The only perks of his dog tags still having full Tech clearance was that the panel slid off the wall to reveal a narrow metal staircase. “I’ll show you the roof.”

Ronan cast him a glance, a mischievous light in his very blue eyes, and Adam spent the entire way up with a weird sense of satisfaction pooled in his chest, only exacerbated by the tortuous path. This was a route strictly used for maintenance purposes and the _access restricted_ seemed to apply also to the ease in walking it. When the door to the roof opened, the gush of wind was so strong Adam felt the impact for a second, before pushing forward — but it was also a relief, brought by the sudden openness of their surroundings.

They both blinked owlishly at the contrast between the artificial lighting of the inside and the bright, unshielded sun shining over a crystal clear sky. The rooftops of all the other hangars expanded empty around them, the howling of the wind as the only noise. Further out, there was only the sea on one side and the jutting profile of Hong Kong to accompany them. 

Ronan took a deep breath and Adam turned towards the sound, more attuned to it than he was to his own heartbeat. In plain sunlight, Ronan was handsome and somehow surreal, as if a mystery night time creature had finally graced the day with his impossible self. He had very long eyelashes, black like his hair, and Adam obsessed over the slight shadow they cast as Ronan closed his eyes and breathed in and out again. 

The sunlight also washed out some of the tiredness from Ronan’s face, but the bags under his eyes were too evident for Adam not to file in his extensive analytical catalogue.

Something of his staring must have been evident to Ronan — just as Adam was always aware, in the server room, of when Ronan turned around to watch him even without calling over. A hand reached for Adam’s arm and grasped over it, even before Ronan opened his eyes.

“Ronan…” Adam started, mulling over everything they found and everything they had _yet_ to find. Still, talking about it felt preposterous — they were not going to stop, reality was not going to wait for them.

“You should have brought me here sooner,” Ronan said, opening his eyes to stare at Adam — intense, very focused, and unfiltered. “I like it.”

“I knew you would,” Adam replied, and only after realised how _deep_ the statement ran. He knew it, and Ronan knew things back — Adam _trusted him_ to know. “I’ll bring you more often.”

Ronan grinned thinly, with an edge of not-quite-danger, and crowded Adam’s space enough to force him to walk backwards — until the metal side of one of the ventilation systems was behind Adam and there was nowhere else to go. 

Among the many moods the situation could entice, Adam stared back at Ronan and his very, _very_ blue eyes. He should have scrutinised them in the sunlight before, he thought, while reaching for Ronan’s shoulders.

Before he could do anything else, Ronan bent his knees just slightly and grasped at the sides of Adam’s thighs, hoisting him up to sit on the vent. It was not shocking — not for all the ways Ronan had found to effortlessly smash him on the floor of the training rooms — but it tingled nicely down Adam’s spine. He spread his legs enough to drag Ronan to stand between them. 

Between the warmth of the sun on the vent guide and the heat of Ronan’s body in his arms, Adam suddenly felt more comfortable than all the hours he had spent in the server rooms.

“Ten minutes,” Ronan whispered, and surged up to kiss Adam.

It was deep, and wet, paced by Ronan’s hands stroking along Adam’s thighs and sliding underneath his shirt to brush all the way to Adam’s ribs. Adam’s eyelids felt heavy, split between the comfort of intimacy and the flare of passion that lit up Adam’s mind every time the rugged path of Ronan’s drift scars brushed under his fingertips. 

They came back late, probably failing to look entirely casual about it, but the heat of it stayed with Adam for hours, after.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The day started in glory around 5 am, when Ronan and Helen concluded they had enough consistency in their material to give at least a preliminary report to the rest of the group.

“I think it’s promising,” Helen outlined, popping up some schematics on the shared screen. It was more habit in debriefing than actual necessity, they had separated the work exactly to comb through a pile of information faster. No one was going to read it, they would trust the 10-minutes-explanation, but it was still reassuring to go through the motions. “The three Mark-III cores are interconnected, so we might be able to find the Fox’s core by establishing a resonance through Raven King and Greywaren.”

Declan glanced at Adam and Gansey, as if in a silent assessment, and then said, “It sounds consistent with the line we’re following, but we haven’t found anything on the interconnection. Do you have more details?”

Helen thinned her lips, with one leg and one hip on a table. “Not exactly, the archives are suffering from a bit of a matryoshka effect.”

Ronan would have jitter his leg, if nervous tics like that had not been trained out of him years before. “I think we’ll have to look better in files that cross with Dad’s clearance,” he admitted, at the end.

Predictably, Declan turned with a piercing stare, “And you say that why?”

“Artemus uses numbering for everything,” Ronan said, with a huff. “Dad liked names, instead.” And with all the hours Ronan had spent in Niall’s room, just because, in the last period, he certainly knew. But he did not need to say it so pathetically. “Every time there is a reference in the interface dynamics that suggests interconnection it refers to a Protocol Cabeswater...which is of course unsearchable.”

Declan got up from his chair in an uncharacteristic display of abruptness. Ronan did not think Declan had meant to do that, not considering how he stilled right after. He barely concealed the motion by going to the post Helen had left vacant and glance at the screens without any purpose in particular.

“I’m sure that’s Dad’s stuff,” Declan said, at the end, when the silence got too awkward even for his pretense.

“Why?” Ronan asked, feeling his forehead tensing in a frown.

Declan rolled his eyes at him, with the softed impression of a snort. “Of course you don’t remember,” a slight shaking of his head, and Declan looked away again. “That’s what you used to call the forest behind our home in Ireland...Cabeswater. You insisted it was magical and Dad indulged you...so…”

So Niall had remembered, for his naming conventions, even though Ronan himself had forgotten.

The silence had a different quality, now, and Ronan swallowed thickly. 

“We’ll research more carefully, then,” Helen said, but there was a softness in her resoluteness.

They were all well-acquainted with grief, in theory, but Ronan was certain neither of the Ganseys really understood _this_ grief in particular. But he didn’t wish for them to.

He would have left the room again, but Declan beat him to it, with only five minutes of implausible plausible deniability. It pissed Ronan off, the fact that Declan was too _Declan_ even to admit being upset — and yet, Ronan would not know what to do with his brother, if he had been forward with his feelings, certainly no more than Ronan knew what to do with his own.

It took Declan more than thirty minutes to come back to the server room. Once he did, it was only to slide back into the chair he had occupied for the last day, turning three screens back on from the standby mode and diving back into the data. His movements were neat like those of a pilot in a harness, and even Ronan — who only came close to understanding Declan in the middle of a brotherly fistfight — could actually follow the compulsion.

It was better than talking. They could do working, getting an outcome, and maybe the peace of mind would follow at some point.

Roughly twelve hours later, the “Drift-interface” Team seemed to be having 75% of a moment, bumping the indiscernible codes of Artemus’s folders and reports back and forth between each other.

“No, just…” Gansey said, passing a hand under his hair, already in disarray, when Helen reminded him of his break slot. “You and Ronan should take it, go to dinner with Blue and Henry or something, I’m sure we’ll be a bit less tangled when you come back.”

Declan cocked his head and Adam lifted his right eyebrow in two different brands of skepticism, but they both agreed to the change of schedule.

Having Declan holding Gansey and Adam hostage, and thus monopolising two of the pillars of Ronan’s existence, was disturbing in a rather petulant way. But he could see that both Gansey and Adam were very engrossed in whatever data mining deal they were trying to untangle, so Ronan just grasped onto Gansey’s nape with one hand and bent to kiss Adam’s temple. 

“I’ll tell them to put your portions on hold, you nerds,” he said. And that included Declan, as well, though Ronan did not clarify that. 

He walked off, pointedly ignoring Helen’s lopsided grin and flipping a bird to Blue and Henry in a multitasking feat as he allowed them to exit the server room first.

Dinner was a stilted affair, exactly like everything tended to be when Ronan was out of a known comfort zone. The only fraction of familiarity was represented by Helen, and hushed discussions about possible downfalls of Dreamcatcher in testing were the only ones Ronan decently managed to provide input to. It would have been better with Gansey, with whom Ronan had not had a stilted conversation since they were twelve years old, or with Adam, who did not talk a lot but clicked with Ronan’s brain as only his drift companion could. 

When they left the canteen and walked back to the RDI department, Ronan was almost looking forward to more hours in front of a screen. 

He smashed his dog tags on the sensor and the door to the server room slid open. On the other side, there was evidently a discussion going on, heated enough that they all could catch the back and forth even from the doorframe.

“...full-on bullshit!” Declan’s voice was a clear sign that Dr Jekyll was close to giving ground to Mr Hyde.

“...plenty of evidence that points…” Gansey was still trying to argue with some point, but they were speaking on top of each other.

“That’s an unprecedented accusation!” Declan insisted.

“Artemus is a hell of a precedent!” Adam added to the clamour, vehement enough to drop his usual avoidance in favour of the flames Ronan knew all too intimately.

Ronan barged further inside before Helen, Blue, or Henry could precede him. 

Gansey and Adam stood side by side, holding the front together against a superbly pissed-off Declan who towered over the both of them. Their screens were still lit up but the conversation had evidently derailed from the nerding Ronan had left them with.

“What the fuck is going on here?” 

Ronan’s bark was as effective as Helen’s withering stare — factory mark of every Gansey — in blocking the conversation. The escalation was clearly avoided, with the three of them drawing aside from each other, but the tension remained high.

“Look, they’re all back,” Declan hissed, with a clear undertone of mockery. “You’re so sure of your fucking deduction, report it over to the others.”

Even though both Adam and Gansey had seemed more than willing to stand their ground, there was something uncomfortable in the way they looked at each other at Declan’s demand. Ronan had very much wanted the two of them to like and know each other, but he had the net impression that this was _not_ the type of complicity he had been hoping for.

“Very well,” Gansey said, with that tone that suggested it wasn’t well at all. “I’m not denying we can get better data with more time, but I think Adam and I reached some conclusions...one that chains the core issues, Manila, and the drifting. Sit down, please.”

In another situation, an announcement like this would have been akin to an all-purpose solution right from the skies. Instead, as they went to sit down, Ronan had that tingling along his nape — exacerbated by Declan’s glare — that made him think he would regret this moment very soon.

Gansey walked in front of the shared screen for a moment, rubbing a thumb over his mouth as Ronan had seen him do countless of times when he had to speak with the press, or the rest of the Corps. “Let’s guide you from base up, Adam and I went a bit forward and backwards in reconstructing this, but maybe we’ll convince Declan too this time…”

“You really won’t,” Declan snarled, standing in the back with his back to the wall in a display of broodiness that Ronan would have approved of in other situations.

“A pity, then,” Gansey countered, more deadpan now. “Okay, so, as you all know very well, the RDI put significant efforts in classifying the Kajiu as we were still looking for a solution. That’s the type of coding we use to collect material and also to give the threat level. I do believe some of these creatures along the years have been misclassified, for no bigger reason than that we didn’t always get fully grown-individuals...and from Artemus’s notes, he got to more or less the same conclusion, he has double notations on some specific Kajiu.”

Ronan could feel his eyebrows draw up, and when he turned to look around Blue was sporting very much the same perplexed expression. He shrugged, she rolled her eyes, and they both elected to listen to this Kajiu 101 introduction in faith that Gansey would actually find a point for it.

“There are some cases in particular that Artemus highlighted with specific misclassification codes, I crossed the databases and they’re all cases in which the Corps recovered the carcasses. I think there are others but the recurring ones in Artemus’s notes are all from the end of 2016 and 2017,” there was a pause in this, longer than what it took Gansey to pop up the eight-year-old mission reports and close up of what he was talking about.

“I remember those,” Helen piped up immediately.

“Yeah, who the hell is gonna forget the motherfuckers,” Ronan groaned, with the same instantaneous recognition.

“What about them?” Blue asked, eyeing Gansey carefully.

Helen leaned more fully against the backrest of her chair, crossing her legs, “These were among the first bridging between Category 1 and Category 2, basically the moment when the development of Mark-II became a priority or we wouldn’t have managed.”

“That exactly, and then there was another escalation like this around the middle of 2019, and that too is marked in Artemus’s files with some examples in particular,” Gansey confirmed, and dragged up some other examples. “Artemus seemed to think that in reality the first ones in full potential would have been a Category 4, and these last ones would have gotten to the Category 5 that we only met close to the Rim.”

Though it was evident that they had extensive notes on the issue, at which Gansey looked up at intervals from his tablet, the train of thought remained obscure to most of them.

“Richardman, not to be rude, but I don’t see how we really connect everything from here,” Henry admitted, looking at Gansey and Adam and then further back at Declan who seemed to take personal offense to the proceedings. 

“There is a trail of study material that did not get disposed of and actually ended up in the experimental development sectors,” Adam intervened, more concise than Gansey but not less tense. “We’ll send you all the matching of changes in the designation and stuff, but the basis of it is that all this Kajiu material ended up in the Mark-series upgrade.”

Ronan froze on the spot at the sound of it, staring back unblinkingly at Adam’s serious expression.

It took Helen to break the silence, with a very much not casual tone. “Dick, what is that supposed to mean?”

Gansey pinched the bridge of his nose but then went forward with the down-to-Earth approach that Adam had established in smashing through the issue. “It means that the upgrade through the Mark-series was likely tied to a process of xenobiological engineering...which is basically to say that Artemus, and I daresay Niall as well, merged what they could harvest from the Kaiju into enhancing the Jaegers.”

Ronan swallowed against his constricting throat. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“That’s exactly what I told them,” Declan provided, as if it were any consolation to maybe agree with his brother in a situation like this.

“The rerouting is consistent,” Adam said, low but sure, in the same way he did everything that mattered. “The exponential development of the drifting interface, and of Dreamcatcher, is more compatible with the integration of some pre-existing technology than just something that appeared.”

“It wouldn’t just _appear_ ,” Declan snarled, surprisingly heated in the whole matter, even though Ronan was starting to catch what was there to be upset about. “This is a whole life of work from my father!”

“No one is denying it, and certainly the Mark-I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without Niall. And even if this is the key, it’s still Niall and Artemus,” Gansey argued, but the strain of the concept was evident regardless.

“A solution like this would not be a solution, it would be a contamination, it would be unmanageable,” Declan insisted, stepping away from the wall to get closer. 

There was a slow, uneasy inhaling from Blue and Henry. “Maybe it’s not that crazy,” Blue murmured. “You told us just a few days ago that Artemus died drifting with a Kaiju residue to guide Greywaren to the drift.”

“That exactly,” Gansey admitted. “I always wondered how he managed to create the technology but I assumed it was an issue of _do or die_.”

All the points were starting to unite coherently, and the very fact made Ronan’s blood boil first, and then sink to the soles of his feet right after, when Adam went to add additional details.

“And I can say that the energy readings of the Mark-III series never really matched. So the Mark-II went past the neural handshake and towards a proper drift, plus Dreamcatcher. Right after, there was... _something_...that got implemented directly into the Mark-III series by pushing anything useful that could be harvested off these special Kaiju. And that’s how we get to the full potential of the three irreproducible cores.”

“And get the great obsession of infinite energy,” Henry completed, low but evidently following, as each of them was following.

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ,” Declan rattled, derailed enough to take the Lord’s name in vain despite of the very few rules of courtesy Niall ever enforced it. “It’s ridiculous, okay? A big conspiracy theory, that conveniently forgets that Ronan spent the last ten fucking years drifting with Dad. Can you tell them?”

It was almost personal, put like this, and the kid that Ronan had been would have very much liked Declan to get this _personal_ with him, with a direct unavoidable request. It was a grim irony of fate the fact that this was the wrong moment for it.

“That’s not how it works, Declan,” Ronan had to admit, rigidly. “Dad...always had a lot of control...not that it was difficult, when you can play with a big age gap. If you had given me something to look for, when we drifted then...I would know. But I never thought of looking for something like this.”

Declan smashed a hand on the desk beside Ronan and leaned into his space, threatening even though Ronan did not even flinch at the sound. “So you think that’s what we’ve been doing in the last five years? Playing monsters with monsters?”

“ _We_? Maybe what _I_ ’ve been doing, Dad must have known you’d get your panties in a twist over doing _whatever it takes_.”

Ronan felt the punch coming with those fractions of seconds of reactivity that would make every difference in battle. Still, he chose to finish exactly what he was saying, hissing the point home, and then canted to the side under the impact of Declan’s right hook. Ronan’s jaw felt numb with it, for a second. The white-hot ache that spread right after was a type of hurt he knew how to deal with. 

He was already charging up the retaliation when a hand pressed on his face and drew him backwards.

“This is _enough_ ,” Helen snarled between thinned lips, and between her fingers Ronan could see her prosthetic hand right under Declan’s neck. “If you think I won’t put you in isolation, _think again_ and be civil.”

“I’m being perfectly _fucking_ civil, but Declan dearest here can’t cope with the shitshow!” Ronan snatched Helen’s hand away from his face, his words a bit distorted by the soreness, but he took a step back rather than charging back forward.

“Well, someone _has_ to cope, but it’s evidently not you two, straight from kindergarten while we’re _still_ in critical compromise,” Helen rattled off, and the tense paleness of her face seemed to suggest that she was not coping that well either. But the Ganseys never knew what to do with _upset_ , so the pulling rank was not surprising. “Declan, get out of the way and work with your own databases. I’ll go and speak with Maura and Calla. And the rest of you...more data for planning, less drama, because we have a _damn_ core to recover.”

There was a metallic feeling in Ronan’s mouth, and he could not help but think that Declan’s right hook was still better than his own, more similar to Niall’s. The familiarity of it was at the same time grounding and distracting. 

He still uttered, “Yes, ma’am,” together with all the others.

It was better than wondering what he would tell his father if he were to be as close as the blood in Ronan’s mouth.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The whirring of the server room had merged into background noise in Gansey’s brain, but it still somehow helped to keep the nervous edge of his thoughts sharp and insistent.

Helen had said to provide _more_ , and more was what they had tried to go for in the past handful of hours. The overall picture, stubbornly, did not change. If anything, it became more interconnected with everyone looking at the same line of clues from different angles. 

It would have been almost nice, to be able to claim confirmation bias, but ironically Niall Lynch himself had taught Gansey, over and over, that the most elegant solution was always the most likely one to be true.

Their _most likely_ at the moment looked like an ambitious plan of fighting fire with fire, with which Artemus had stripped pieces of Kaiju to fix them back in the very human weapons designed to fight them. It was deranged in a brilliant way, as Gansey’s mind kept nagging him, and it might have saved the world. 

The Mark-III series had that same core that made Kaiju so difficult to annihilate, energetically self-sustained and with multiple processors synched with multiple pilots to guide the decisions. The analogy was so clear that in retrospect Gansey felt stupid for not having put the two concepts side by side alone.

After all, it turned out, they might be able to find the Fox core with the same ease with which two Kaiju always found each other. 

And then there was Dreamcatcher, an impossible idea materialised through impossible means. In all likelihood, this was really a case of Niall Lynch disregarding any limits, and _upgrading_ was xenobiological engineering.

Gansey pressed the palm of his hand on his forehead, the brightness of the screen dancing against his retina even with his eyes closed. Around him, Adam, Blue, and Henry were still shuffling around their elected point of analysis. 

Ronan had stuck with them for hours on end, long enough to guide Adam through the fairly cryptic variation of blueprints Artemus kept in his archives. When they found the one for the core-drift interface of Greywaren, it was like looking at an abstract painting of a fairytale forest, but they might have stumbled inside it too late to learn the moral of the story.

Displayed on a wide screen, the light blue line of the components appeared to almost shimmer on the blue background, too close to a living and breathing organism. Ronan frowned at it, two fingers brushing on the aseptic surface of the monitor. “They’ve always kind of glowed from the inside, right, Dick?”

To this, Gansey did not have a proper answer because their Jaeger very much did. He averted his gaze, looking reflexively for Blue and Henry in the room, as a tangible proof of _something_ that was not just a magic trick too widely accepted to be properly questioned. Henry looked back at him, but Blue was looking at her hands, distractedly.

“The encryption box glowed too,” she murmured, yet another obvious thing that connected dots previously left alone.

“Mary Mother of Jesus…” Ronan got up, abruptly, but then hesitated when the gesture sort of rocked him against Adam. “I need a fucking minute, and I...fuck…” He ran a hand over his head, avoiding to look at any of them. “I can’t remember if I know something.”

It would have been a weird statement for anyone, but this was a team of pilots.

“Ronan, it’s okay if you don’t,” Gansey murmured, starkly aware of how he himself was steadily losing some of Helen’s most established area of expertise in his own train of thought, now that they did not drift together anymore. And she had not even been brutally smacked out of his mind, like Niall had from Ronan. 

“It doesn’t matter if you don’t,” Adam echoed, but with a different twist. He looked at the screen with the same uncompromising expression Gansey had seen on his face when he got up, again and again, on the training grounds. “We’ve got this, we’ll figure it out.”

Ronan rolled his eyes, but there was something almost soothed, a fraction of weight off all his tension. He brushed Adam’s arm, and nudged Gansey’s shoulder on his way out. 

Three hours later, it was still just the four of them. Even Adam, who among them seemed to have a resistance to fatigue that went beyond military training, was rubbing his eyes too often. When his pager beeped, Gansey was not too shocked in seeing him getting up after a short moment of consideration.

“I think I need some sleep, a break,” Adam said, contained as usual. He had a moment of pause, in the process of locking his terminal, with one last look at the section of the blueprint he had zoomed in on, before everything went dark and shut off from possible nosey eyes. “This is a bit messy. A lot messy.”

“I know,” Gansey sighed, looking dejected at their little pile of empty coffee cups, and at Henry, who was sort of collapsing at the other side of them. “I think we’ll take a break soon, too.”

“Good, then, page me if you’re back and I’m not around yet,” Adam said, waving his hand a bit — still awkward with them, to some degree, but getting more confident with prolonged exposure and the evidence that no one questioned his presence in the group.

Gansey simply bid him a good rest, rather than telling him outright to make sure that Ronan rested too. It was obvious that he was not going to roam off to loneliness — and, in turn, that Ronan would not be left to his own devices any longer — but it was difficult to just say it without ending a _tad bit condescending_ , as Henry sometimes tried to explain to him. 

He dragged his team off as promised, right after, and refused to feel guilty about the standy-by/lock-down of the server room. 

The relief of his body when he got to lay down in a dark room suggested that it was the right call.

“Do you think my Mum knew all of this? While she was in Manila?” Henry’s voice came as a murmur against Gansey’s back, low like a confession that might be there and gone forever, if admitting it out loud turned out to be the wrong call.

“She seemed to be too good with information, I think she didn’t, or the solution would have been found ages ago,” Blue murmured from her burrow under the covers, her forehead shifting slightly against Gansey’s chest.

Held steady and safe, Gansey could forgo the reluctance to say what everyone must be thinking by now. “I’m having a hard time believing that _my_ parents didn’t know at least something.”

For this, not even Blue and Henry had ready reassurances to offer. Henry’s hand ran slowly along the side of his chest, combing his hair away from his face, and there was some level of comfort with that.

“I do think, though,” Henry added, “that everyone just wanted to fix this, more than wanting to know _how_. See Maura, even, I mean…”

Blue nodded, we a little sigh. “A whole army against the apocalypse...we just wanted to believe that we could, mh?”

_And we very much did_ , Gansey thought. It was difficult to comment on the cost, right now, so he stayed silent. 

“We really should sleep,” he said, instead, and kept Blue and Henry as close as he could get them.

The drift had brought them together, whatever the drift might really hide.

He felt a bit more human and a bit less on the brink of a nervous breakdown when he woke up, a luxurious seven hours later. Nevertheless, he did not manage to stuff himself back inside the server room, and just let Henry and Blue go ahead without him, just in case Adam and Ronan were already there.

The door of the idle-launching hall opened for him without any qualms, leaving way to several meters of main crossing bridge. Energy saving protocols dictated that the hangar was mostly pooled in a blue hue, and the sharpest light came from the railing of the bridge itself, lighting up the surroundings. 

At the two sides of it, Glendower and Raven King stood face-to-face, meters apart but relatively close given their size. The bridge crossed over roughly at their chestplate height, and the light shone into a cone almost up to their helmets, leaving everything else pooled in darkness by contrast. 

The last two Jaegers of the Mark-III series were monumental, and full of secrets. 

Ronan Lynch — Colonel, brother, fellow fighter of apocalypse — stood in the centre of the bridge, leaning against the railing to look up at Greywaren with his back to Raven King. 

There were no greetings and no surprise, when Gansey halted beside him. Ronan just scooted over and left enough space on the railing for Gansey to rest against it, elbows pinned on the metal and facing Raven King. Their shoulders touched, and they both leaned against the contact. The span of their arms against one another grounded Gansey to the _now and here_ more than anything else in the last few days.

“I always knew they were using Dreamcatcher...a Dreamcatcher…” Ronan murmured, after several seconds of silence. “From the first time, with Dad, I knew they were warping. They’re hunting us with warping. And I don’t know what it makes me, the fact that I know it, that I could...feel it…”

Ronan trailed off and did not pick up his train of thought again, but Gansey could complete it easily enough. 

“Manila must have been where this diverged. Whatever was lost, whoever was lost...they must have gotten something out of it, enough to get to today,” Gansey sighed, voice low and private. 

“Kaiju scraps, you mean.”

“That, too.”

Their Jaegers, and whatever xeno-material had been denatured and integrated into making them functional, loomed over them, foreign and familiar at the same time. Known and safe, but so _unknowable._

“You know Dreamcatcher in prototype probably killed Noah, right?” Ronan asked, brutal with himself first and foremost. “I always thought we had been the first line of fire, but also the first line of advancement, and instead they tested it on them. And it killed them, and...I don’t know, maybe trapped them?”

“I know,” Gansey confirmed, simply. “And I also know that without that we wouldn’t be here, probably...with a closed Rim and all that.”

One of Ronan’s combat boots kicked against the railing in frustration. The sound echoed dully into the hangar and then diffused back to silence. “I don’t think they really know what they unleashed...the ghosts, or whatever the fuck is happening. I don’t think we know what we’re playing with.”

Gansey swallowed against nothing, and Raven King seemed to look down at him, deceptively still and innocuous as every inactive machine should be. If Gansey stared long enough, his mind tricked him into thinking something shimmered between the fixtures. 

Maybe it was only the uneven light of the hangar. 

Maybe not.

“I’m still going up there,” he whispered to Ronan. “I’m still piloting, because otherwise I don’t know what to do with this. I don’t know what we’re doing, and that’s true, but I don’t think we have another choice.”

Another kick, reinforced heel to metal. “Of course that’s how it is, isn’t it?” Ronan snarled, his fury broadcasted but not really directed to Gansey himself. “Just once, Gansey. Just once, I would like it to be a choice...I would like to look at this, look at the world, then look at you and tell you _fuck it, we’re leaving_. Just once.”

To this, Gansey did not have an answer that did not sound empty or counterproductive. They both knew they were not leaving. And even in Ronan’s fantasy, if Gansey were to say _no, let’s stay_ , hypothetical-Ronan would stay — just like hypothetical-Gansey would, in a reversed situation. 

“We’ll be done, even with _the Assholes_ ,” Gansey rolled the curse in his mouth, viciously. It was a good nickname for _them_ , whoever they were, Ronan had been right about it. “We’ll be done, and when we are I’ll be glad to have finished together.”

Ronan let out a little snort, and Gansey was half-expecting a comment on how corny or gross he was being — not completely underserved. But the comment did not arrive, and Ronan pressed his weight more firmly against Gansey’s arm.

No one should ever use the term _brother-in-arms_ without having experienced this.

“We really need to go and sort that database,” Gansey said, after a long moment and a deep sigh.

“Right, shit. You’d better come up with a plan for the Fox’s core recovery,” Ronan grumbled, but slowly straightened himself up and away from the railing to get going.

“I’ll come up with a plan,” Gansey assured, because that was what he did. What he would do, because it was _needed_.

As they walked, Gansey toyed with the idea of bringing up Adam as very talented provider of crazy plans and wild deductions. “You know…” he started, close to the door of the hangar.

There was a _click._

The door slid open unprompted, its frame lit up in red. The whole hangar flashed out of the energy saving mode, and everything was bright and alert. At the far side of the hangar, the window that faced towards the Operation Hall came alive.

_“All operative personnel to the Hall.”_

Gansey turned to look at Ronan, seeing his own awareness reflected in Ronan’s aghast expression. All their life, this had been the signal of a war clock about to set in countdown mode. And yet in this precipitous time even this alert lasted only two seconds.

The blaring of sirens started within the hangar and steadily spread like an avalanche throughout the whole Shatterdome. 

For the first time since the closing of the Pacific Rim, the walls of the Headquarter shook with a Code Blue.

The screen of the Operation Hall was visible and unforgiving even at hundreds of meters of distance.

_Critical Alert. Warzone: Hong Kong, City._

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE CLIFFHANGER, PART 2, NOW EVEN STRONGER!
> 
> Chapter 6 will be out on **Saturday June 8th**
> 
> (This is unless work deadlines go completely bananas, in this case check this section for edits but I'm writing in Hardcore Mode for it)
> 
> For announcements, updates, random screaming and "Mist what the fuck", you can refer to [my Tumblr](http://seekthemist.tumblr.com), the ask box is always open!
> 
> Thank you so much for sticking up with me this far, not long left until the wrap up now. My never-ending love goes also to all the people commenting, the comments keep getting better and better and they make my day, every day, all day!
> 
> ****
> 
> **Scheduling and Life Edit as per 06/06:** Good news is that there has been productivity around at work in the last two weeks, plus I got a paper accepted for publication! Bad news is that it required me to run after instruments, do revisions of figures and data and captions, write the referee response and the like, so I had less time to do what I wanted to in terms of fandom.
> 
> There will thus be no update this Saturday, because Chapter 6 needs to be in the Most Perfect Shape.
> 
> **Beyond the Edge of Our Hope will come back swinging on Saturday 15th!**
> 
> Hopefully this will also give people time to come down from the Call Down The Hawk high and digest the amount of words that I already published!
> 
> Please stick with me, I swear it will be worth it!


	7. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good thing I decided to make an additional Chapter and I took one week more, because the fact that I'm having attachment issues to this fic is showing in the word count.
> 
> But now we're here, Rachel (purrsnicket) is once again a hero for dealing with me and my madness. 
> 
> You know what's coming, but this epic battle will be in epic format, and I'll tie most of the loose ends.
> 
> Get ready for the beginning of the end, I'll see you on the other side.

  
  
  


Reaction times were a concept polished to perfection in every Shatterdome, with the Headquarter leading by example. No one could be cleared for active duty without being within the expectations, and an inability to comply could mean rejection and discharge of otherwise optimal candidates. 

The launching hangar and Operation Hall came alive within ten seconds of Code Blue sirens blaring through the base, buzzing with people from different departments and at different levels. 

Ronan had already recovered one of the in-built tablets from the socket beside the hangar door, and Gansey had shot three quick messages in series, all with the same content.

_Launch HGR_

It was only Henry, notoriously the fastest in handling pagers and general comms while multitasking, who replied to Gansey.

_All in 3m._

“The _Assholes_ are in Hong Kong, Dick,” Ronan hissed, tossing the screen of the tablet in Gansey’s field of vision.

It was more of an impression than a leisurely look. 

Hong Kong, in wide-field view, with its skyscrapers and the armoured defence walls around the harbour, was a familiar picture. In stark contrast, the profile of what looked remarkably like a Jaeger was advancing through the buildings, steadily leaving damages behind.

One of the control towers was streaming the live footage through the internal channels of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps, but none of the proximity alerts that covered the region for a radius of 113 km had been triggered. 

“They warped in,” Gansey uttered, following Ronan’s implicit deduction. 

After all the dancing around, there had been no need to go and get them — they had barged directly into the PPDC’s city. Gansey could feel his teeth pressing into his gums with the strength of clenching his jaw.

With a tap at the side of the tablet, Ronan opened the comms with the Commanding bridge, who must have seen them online in the system. “Lynch and Gansey, copy and ready in the hangar.”

“The teams will gather in 2 minutes and 43 seconds,” Gansey added, waving the pager to Ronan in a silent conveying of information.

“The debriefing will commence as soon as the Jaegers are in ready-steady,” Astrid Gansey notified them from the bridge, and even through the noise her voice was cutting with tension.

Standing as close as they were, Ronan’s snarl was almost a tactile sensation for Gansey, before he even spoke through it. “Debriefing what? We have a situation in Hong Kong, _now_ , with a fucking unauthorised Jaeger or whatever the hell that is. As it hasn’t razed the city to the ground yet, I’d say it’s waiting for us.” Ronan’s frown was dark, thunderous, paired with a merciless rattle that reminded Gansey of what happened when Niall pushed him just a bit close to _too far_. “Greywaren will engage immediately, we’ll warp right on this fucker. Raven King will follow.”

“Colonel Lynch, there are strategic concerns…” 

“It’s late for strategy,” Gansey interjected, keeping the comms in voice only as he and Ronan surveyed the footage. “Ma’am, we’ll need coordination but this is a tactical situation. We’ll proceed now, as we have clearance too.”

For as much as they could discern from the device currently in use, this Code Blue was definitely not a Kaiju, nor a shapeless aggressive weapon like the ones they encountered so far. It did look like a Jaeger, and it was placed in a point of the city that would maximise damages. The skyscrapers were already steadily changing shape as the state-of-the-art shielding engaged. 

Bringing down Hong Kong was not going to be an easy feat, not after years of optimisation as the vanguard for the war against the Kaiju. That did not mean it was impossible to try, or that Gansey looked forward to the collateral damage. And yet for every second they waited, it became clear that this stray Jaeger was not applying the same blind destruction Ronan and Gansey had experienced in their radio-silence ambushes. 

“I’m reconsidering your clearances if you can’t recognise a trap when you’re handed one,” his mother's voice could have frozen the bay over, but Ronan was smirking a bit sideways at his being in the middle of a very rare conflict between the higher authority of General Gansey and the rest of the family.

“We do recognise it, it’s very well-handled and it leaves us with no alternative engagement procedure,” Gansey replied, tapping around the tablet with Ronan to approximate some core spots to handle the fight — reinforced buildings, weapon shielding, undercurrent power supplies — even in the low quality of the maps they had. It would be faster and better on a Jaeger, but they did not have time. “I can’t exclude support from the air- and groundborne contingents, but if this Jaeger has the Fox core nothing else will bring it down.”

Silence ticked for two seconds, and each of them felt like more than Gansey could spare, even just for his mother to deal with the too-blatant acknowledgement of an unprecedented situation. 

“Very well,” Astrid Gansey said, with that tone that suggested that it was not _well_ at all. Gansey found he did not care for the disapproval, and it might equally be the adrenaline or some tipping point he had just _passed_. “You have command of the operation, we’ll coordinate the support and the evacuation, and I expect _no accidents_ in this...that includes, Colonel Lynch, that thing going back whichever way it came.”

Ronan laughed but it was not quite a laugh at all. He dumped the tablet in Gansey’s hands and went to the internal comm frame. “The _Asshole_ is not going anywhere, General.”

“You have 1 minute and 17 seconds to launch,” his mother communicated to them, and closed the channel.

Ten years of training and five years of active duty managing the apocalypse side by side meant that Gansey did not have to spare more words, or more looks, with Ronan. But everything had a different edge, ringing with the absence of Helen and Niall on two different levels. 

Now, they were in charge. Now, this was _on them_.

“I want the weaponry in Hangar 83912 to 83985 checked, charged, and cleared for Dreamcatcher,” Ronan was rattling in the comms to whichever member of the Logistics team must have picked up his call. “Bring up the equipment ramps from the 87092 in the field, we’ll need to pick it up on the run.”

Gansey needed the cooperation of more people he could communicate with, so he shot some messages through the tablet: for the ramping, first of all, so Raven King could chase right after Greywaren’s warping leap; their own weapons, second; the diagnostics and lock-in analytics, third. And he was running out of time, of course, even though issue number four — weaponising the City — was key to the operation. 

_“I’ll cover the city, I’ve got you. Just go. -H”_

His breath caught and then released at the pager message flashing, and the absence felt a bit less overwhelming. He looked up to the Operation Hall, and down in the Launching Hangar were an entire squad of technicians was performing the last checks and optimisations on Raven King and Greywaren with the brutal efficiency of a perfectly-executed military drill.

It was on them, and they would hold the line of fire, but the first line would not be the last. They would not be alone in this.

Critical protocol dictated that the main entrances to top priority hangar would remain open unless otherwise requested. As such, Gansey heard footsteps before he’d even turned around and knew the wait was over.

Blue, Adam, and Henry were rushing towards them, all heaving breaths and broad steps even though they must have used the high-speed shortcuts to get across the Shatterdome.

Ronan reached over as he turned, and Gansey saw Adam skipping on a step to reach back — when they touched, it was forearm over forearm and hands over elbows, grappling at each other. It was the only sign of anxiety Ronan has showed so far.

“Parrish, we’re up,” Ronan proclaimed, wild and electric and already pulling Adam with him towards the high gangway with the preparation room. 

It was not like Gansey did not understand the instinct, climbing up the steps with Blue and Henry by his side. He would like to ask them how they thought a person could be both a propeller and an anchor for another — but perhaps another time, without his heart pulsing in his throat.

“The epicentre is Hong Kong City? Really?” Henry hissed along the ramp, dodging the uniform jacket that Ronan had just tossed behind him.

“Central ground, we believe it’s _the Assholes_. With a Jaeger,” Gansey confirmed, fully aware that for them it must have been either _run_ or _check the report_. “Full debrief in the drift, but Greywaren is going to interject them right into the thick of it.”

“Fucking hell,” Blue hissed, and lost a couple of hair clips in getting rid of her shirt. It was nothing in comparison to the damage to Henry’s styling, but commitment came in many forms.

“Fucking that,” Ronan confirmed, halting their path just a second, as the doors of the preparation room opened, for all of them to get rid of shoes and trousers.

There was a split second of internal perplexity, catching up with Gansey suddenly. While all of them were _known_ to him in various degrees, the situation as it stood was not familiar. But then they stepped naked into the platforms of the preparation room, propelled forward by the automated systems, and the unfamiliarity changed shape.

A long time had passed since the preparation room had been used with multiple teams. The night of Operation Doomsday it had been seven of them, ready to cancel the apocalypse. Now they were just five — himself, Ronan and all the people they managed to recover for the final stand, for the fight beyond the fight.

Months before, the very thought of being in this room with people outside of the Old Guard would have sounded blasphemous. Now, with the automated system moving around them and clasping the suits on their bodies — connectors after connectors, naked skin covered with double-lined tech fabric — it just _felt right_.

The preparation room spit them out, all suited up and ready for battle, on the high bridge looming at the top of the hangar. 

“See what happens when we talk too much?” Gansey whispered to Ronan, before they parted ways on the gangway. 

Ronan barked a laugh, tense and adrenalinic, and grasped a hand on Gansey’s nape, right over the connectors. Gansey felt the contact along his spine, and at the same time in more than his body. “Yeah, maybe we called for this. Fuck it, see you in the crossfire.”

Gansey grinned and spun away, leaving Ronan to Adam and Greywaren. Both Jaegers opened up for them in a whistle of fixtures, a recognition and welcome at the same time. 

“This is gonna be messy,” Henry forecasted, with a tense sigh.

“Just hold the centre,” Gansey replied, and raised both hands without even needing to look at Henry and Blue. They met him halfway, as they always did, and they bumped fists . That too was a comfort, in the long list that Gansey constantly found himself compiling.

Then they jumped in, and Raven King closed behind him, and all the lighting of the hutch spoke _battle_ right into Gansey’s soul.

And he brought battle into the drift, thrumming like an earthquake. 

Their brainwaves jumped and shook with it, and their connection climbed up, until Gansey was not himself alone and all of them were _Raven King_.

It was so truly better, with three — with Blue’s brand of reckless sensibleness, and Henry’s joyous approach to anxiety. They lifted a weight in Gansey’s soul, constantly, even now. If they breathed together, it was easier to breathe, even as the screen cleared of the neural handshake reports and split into different windows.

At the bottom left, the Greywaren’s hutch was lit up in battle mode, with Ronan and Adam mirroring each other perfectly in reassessing the position. Out of the hutch, in full display of the main window, Greywaren canted sideways and then forward, detaching from the safety locks as the ceiling opened above them.

At the bottom right, there were only Gansey’s parents, alone in the commanding bridge with some nondescript people moving in the background. “The support and evacuation teams had been deployed in advance,” General Gansey notified them all, making pretty clear where Maura, Calla, Helen and possibly even Declan might have gone off to. “Greywaren and Raven King to launch in five...four...three...two...one…”

The ramp propelled both of their Jaegers up and out of the hangar, a pressure like a small explosion kickstarting the whole operation. 

Out in the grounds, with Hong Kong at high noon, they moved swiftly to the side, leaving way for Ronan and Adam. Greywaren had always been the fastest Jaeger, but with Ronan’s plan they were going to need all the room of maneuver they could muster.

In the plain view of the main window, Gansey, Blue and Henry watched Greywaren charge off into a run. It skipped one step, then another, and one of the equipment ramps of the underground hangars that Ronan had requested opened up. They passed beside it in a flash, snatching a black 90-meter spear out of its locks. 

Another step, right off the ground, and then something compressed in the air around him. 

One second, Greywaren was a stark figure against the blue skye. The next, it was gone, disappeared from their sight. 

As Raven King started running as well, Gansey enlarged the central-bottom window of their screen.

Kilometers ahead of them, Greywaren appeared from thin air between the Hong Kong skyscrapers. 

It crashed like an avalanche, spear-first, into the invading Jaeger. 

Even through the live-footage, the _bang_ felt like war drums.

They were _on_.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The impact rattled their teeth, charged by the speed of the drifting and by their own strength. 

Once again, Ronan was glad for Adam’s lucidity, bright like a beacon in the pitch-dark that always accompanied Ronan’s mind after a particularly energetic warp. The whole plan was designed on the fact that Adam would keep them both reactive, that they would be able to engage in battle with no recovery time. 

In an ideal world, they would have gotten through and inflicted some terminal damage, but this instead was a world where the power of the Jaegers came directly from the horror of the Kaiju. And yet, between Ronan’s trust in Adam and Adam’s trust in Ronan, there was also their reciprocal trust in Greywaren — fighting this fight with them and not against them. 

It was easier to be outraged as a matter of principle, but the drift was more raw. More honest.

The effect of surprise brought them close, brought them _through_ — or so it seemed, until something in the shielding of their adversary shuffled like the rippling scales, and the spear ended up under intersecting plaques on the surface.

In a fraction of a second, Adam yanked them back bodily, with the active propellers at the feet of Greywaren flaming up against the asphalt. The spear came off with them, a sharp metallic sound accompanying the loss of some plaques the movement inflicted. 

It was difficult to even define it as a damage.

They stepped back and the Jaeger turned around too fluidly, as if barely constrained by mechanical joints. The point where Greywaren had ripped off the plaques shimmered, reassembling, but there were fractures on the surface that made a faint light shine through even in the middle of the day.

Though they faced each other, in the middle of Hong Kong, the invader did not attack back immediately, leaving Adam and Ronan with a handful of seconds to assess the counterpart.

The machine in front of them definitely fitted the operative definition of a Jaeger — _anthropomorphic mobile weapons operated by a piloting team_. In the wider sense of term, however, it did not resemble anything the Pan Pacific Defence Corps had ever produced in ten years of war against the Kaiju. 

It looked more like a composition of scraps and spare parts, the bulk of the two legs was different, and the left arm was longer than the right. The shielding looked incomplete, or maybe just inconsistent in thickness and quality of the components, but it had evidently been engineered to move around with some sort of unnatural fluidity, just as the rest of the body moved like a puppet without strings. The frontal plaque was not a helmet, more like a metal casting, and it left the main vision sensor open in shapeless socket-like circles, trailing down towards the chestplate in something like a howling distorted mouth. 

The sight of it gave both Ronan and Adam shivers, irrationally.

The pulsing blue glow that pushed through the insufficient shielding only made the appearance more disconcerting. 

But under the astonishment, Ronan also felt rage — because he knew that glow, it had accompanied him all the way down the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

No one, let alone the killers of his father, should had ever dared to bastardise the Fox’s core as such — even if the core in itself was a bastardised section of a Kaiju.

Ronan breathed just because Adam inhaled sharply enough to force him to follow suit. 

_‘Dreamcatcher’ status: charging. Next warping available in: 00.00.58._

“Activate dynamic warping algorithm,” Adam called, evoking the new protocol Declan had implemented before flipping out completely about Artemus’s drivers.

The subdued _ting_ of operative confirmation from the O.P.A.L. was overrode by a more persistent notification, one that neither of them had been expecting in this situation.

_“Comm channel incoming request.”_

“I’ll comm up your _fucking ass_ ,” Ronan snarled.

They charged up again without any further wait, the lance lined up behind the left arm, guarded, and the ballistics charging up in the right arm. 

The impact less clamorous than attacking through a warping leap, but the overall effect ended up being more violent. This time, the invader attacked back, and it was not only a clash of animosity but also a clash of intents. As Greywaren tried to catch them and engage them in close contact, the Jaeger constantly tried to throw them off, smashing them into the surrounding city and making the skyscrapers shake with the impact even through their protective shielding.

“You’re. A. Mother. Fucker,” Ronan gritted out, his words pacing each of the counterhits. 

Handling the spear without piercing pieces of the city was challenging — and unthinkable, until they could get confirmation of full evacuation at the very least — and became ever more complex while trying to shoulder the hits. This Jaeger was definitely more than flexible — it was half-disjointed, moving unpredictably around and away each of their hits. Adam and Ronan were forced to maneuvered around the spear as a real human body would have done, but Greywaren was not optimised for this and it showed. 

_‘Dreamcatcher’ status: charging. Next warping available in: 00.00.21._

_“Comm channel incoming request.”_

“Sure, ‘cause we’re here to chat,” Adam’s disdain was clear as the sky, even more so as he tried to shoot at one of the invader’s legs and ended up hitting the asphalt when the target moved once again too swiftly.

Ronan could feel Adam thinking, as usual — because Adam was always, _marvellously_ , thinking — but even his restless mind seemed to be on uncertain grounds with this Jaeger. 

The best bet for damages was probably the shimmering shielding, but that too seemed to rearrange dynamically and getting a clear hit was proving challenging. They could attack, but never quite as they had planned, never quite as strong, never really on target.

“Might need to do it creatively with the capped warping,” Adam gritted out.

“Always with creative shit, mh?” Ronan replied, and it was somehow more fluid to talk through each other’s minds if they were maneuvering in a risky way through streets and buildings. 

“I’ll be creative with dinner, next time,” Adam smirked a bit, and his mind broadcasted all the breathless mockeries from Ronan — _you still haven’t bought me dinner first._

It should have been distracting but it unknotted the tension in the middle of Ronan’s spine, and the next hit they landed sideways on the other Jaeger was much more precise. 

_‘Dreamcatcher’ status: charging. Next warping available in: 00.00.12._

_“Comm channel incoming request.”_

“The fuck do they want to chat about?!” Ronan conveyed his annoyance by twisting his grip around the spear and trying to crush the invader’s arm with the leverage. It did not quite work, but Greywaren headbutted it back for good measure and that was at least satisfying.

“We’ve got ten secs, let’s figure it out,” Adam replied, with that alluring expression that seemed to suggest a convoluted and painful type of murder might be getting close any second. 

Riding on the wild, reckless energy of it, Ronan activated the comms.

In battle mode, Raven King and the Commanding Bridge’s channels were currently hidden in background. When the new audiovisual dialogue popped up in the bottom centre region of the window, it was alone, and almost superimposed with the disturbing black metal of the invading Jaeger. 

The enemy’s hutch was barely visible, and yet disturbingly flickering with a blue light that resembled all too much an unfiltered shining from the core. There were two men inside it, markedly different in age. In line with Ronan, to the right, there was someone who might be even younger than them — or older, or the same age; his features were deceptive, slender and unplaceable, with a long nose that guided Ronan’s eyes right to the stranger’s — hollow and wide, a bottomless pit and a glistening naivety at the same time. The one to the left, mirroring Adam’s position, had a strong physique and broad features that would have been mundane if not for how bloated and old he looked in contrast with his companion.

 _Barrington Whelk_ , the recognition echoed through both Adam and Ronan’s mind for the latter. 

The other subject remained unknown. A loud type of unknown that whistled, “So it’s true that three times is a charm! Hello, fuckers.”

Ronan punched them right in the frontal plate rather than replying. There was no real damage but the clanging sound was quite satisfying, even more since Adam had the nice touch of releasing the high-voltage and lightning sparked at the contact with the metal. 

There was a barked laughter from the stranger, and Whelk said, “Rude, kids.”

The Jaeger spun all too fast in Greywaren’s proximity and they felt the hit at stomach-height before they could react. For something so apparently disarticulated, their enemy was very fucking strong.

“You’re for communications, are you?” Adam hissed, unfazed by the propagation of the hit through the neural connection. 

“Well, since we’re here and you’re being more lethargic than a group of trainees…” the younger guy rolled his eyes, and then smiled a bit deranged.

They kicked them off hard enough that the Jaeger ended up smashing on the reinforced shielding of one of the skyscrapers. The ground shook with the impact but the structure held, and though they were trying to contain the damage to the city Adam’s assessment through the drift seemed to be _good enough_.

_‘Dreamcatcher’ status: charging. Next warping available in: 00.00.03._

“And instead what do you think you are, pilots?” Ronan snarled, conveying all his vitriolic disdain. “You’re thieves...Barrington Whelk and whatever fuckweasel you are...thieves and murderers.”

“Oh look, Barry, the Corps did their homework,” the stranger whistled again, and the Jaeger went to disengage from Greywaren again, in a violent series of hits.

“Not surprised you fuckers give out labels while forgetting what the Corps are…” Whelk hissed.

They would have counter-attacked on any other occasion, but there was a small spinning wheel at the bottom of the screen. 

_Proximity alert._

Greywaren accompanied the move and pushed further off with the spear, landing messily three hundred meters away. It was just in time for something to whistle in the air — close, then closer, too close for the enemy to avoid.

A medium range missile impacted on the invading Jaeger and the conflagration echoed through the buildings.

Further off down the evacuated main street, Raven King was a stark silhouette against the light, smoke rising in spirals from one of its arm cannons.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“Critical hit, go team,” Henry proclaimed, setting the cannon to recharge with a little wiggle of his fingers.

“More like you have phenomenal aim as usual,” Gansey said, and Henry could feel the satisfaction for a well executed rush-stealth-coordinate move. 

“What can I say, I know where to stick it,” Henry gloated, feeling Blue’s eyerolling even without having to look around.

“Keep on like that and there will be no more sticking ever,” she threatened, but the fact that she was quenching the innuendo in battle rather than one-upping them was a clear sign of an anxiety that did not normally become her.

As they marched forward, their system came alive with the drift-harmonic channel request from Greywaren. Once activated, the screen lit up with a flood of bullet point debriefing from Adam and Ronan — Fox’s core installed, dynamical shielding, unhinged articulations, anomalous movements, _real fucking Frankenstein Jaeger_.

And Barrington Whelk was piloting on board.

At this point, it was almost difficult to get surprised, even more so with Gansey’s mind mulling and slotting the pieces together neatly.

Greywaren had not even turned to greet them, in pursuit of the invader Jaeger, spear twirling in a hand.

Between the three of them, they absorbed the specs and let the drift intertwine the knowledge to complete and complement each other. The Greywaren’s system had sent over a rendering of the Jaeger, and Henry cringed at the blueprint-like lines on the screen. 

Further off in the street, Greywaren charged through the trail of smoke, thicker and thicker as Raven King itself advanced through the mist raised by the missiles. They could get a sense of commotion through the infrared channels of the camera.

“Dreamcatcher beat, you ready?” Ronan’s voice asked through the comms, as Greywaren lifted the other Jaeger off the asphalt and fought dirty with it — spear and fists and zero-range explosives. 

Following the suggestion, a trail of grating electronica beat through their synched drift — as if they could forget what they did in Okinawa. 

They reassessed their stance, loading both arm cannons and letting Raven King root into the ground with the stakes coming from the soles of its feet, in order to shoulder the recoil. 

“On fire when you are,” Gansey confirmed, as Blue optimised the frequency of the infrared visor in order to clear the whole profile of their target.

Greywaren was too entwined with the other Jaeger for a safe shot. But that was only for now.

They followed the rising bassline in the background, up and up and up, until Greywaren managed to turn with a triple leverage of spear, leg and arm, and brought the back of the invader Jaeger into clear view.

They fired without asking for permission or waiting for a second longer.

The clamor of the explosion was two times louder now, and even though they had picketed down the recoil sent Raven King ten meters backwards, leaving deep ridges in the asphalt. 

The first thing the system reported amidst the smoke was Greywaren, neatly warped twelve meters to the left and easily tracked through the drift harmonics. But then the temperature at the centre of the impact diffused, decreasing, and no less than fifteen alerts flared up at once. 

They barely manage to propel Raven King sideways and avoid the flare that came back at them, diffused and rigged like a poorly-calibrated plasma weapon. The impact of it still dug a hole in the street, sending the asphalt around it melting like black lava. 

Among the lifting smoke, the Jaeger was still standing, surrounded by half-melted metal coils that had not been there when Raven King had fired. 

With its arms still steaming, the Jaeger was stepping out of its improvised sacrificial shielding — a warped-up shielding, Gansey’s deductions provided. Whatever menacing intent it might have harboured against Raven King was stopped in its tracks by Greywaren charging to intercept it.

The cannons needed recharging and there would be no immediate shooting, beat of electronica or not, so Raven King sprinted up to join forces. 

The track was clean and shared in their mind: corner the enemy, sum up the fire power with Greywaren’s warping, inflict maximum damage in the shortest period of time. 

But instead there was another sudden flash of warnings, too close to avoid — literally _just there_.

They crashed right into a group of mecha-wasps, as metallic and menacing as they had been in Okinawa, and their own speed made the impact even more brutal than it would have been normally. 

There was no time to recover, no time to regroup.

The enemy was _multiplying_.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Raven King's double fire rang wild and violent, and pushed Greywaren back in the tail end of their last-second dodging through the warp.

Ronan felt two heartbeats in his chest, his own and Adam's, sharing the same adrenaline, as the electronic beat Opal had provided trailed off.

It should have been a success, a critical hit that would have floored most Jaegers ever produced by the Pan Pacific Defence Corps.

This one instead was still standing. 

Even worse, it was still standing because a semicylinder of metal coils had shielded the hit. And melted or not melted, smoke or no smoke, Ronan would recognise what came after himself and his father anywhere.

The spectacle was more than the evidence they needed that the invaders could use a Dreamcatcher.

It was rage-inducing.

"Let's see how you warp out of this, asshole," Ronan roared, more for himself than for the comms.

And Adam was with him in the fury and the grief, always uncompromising.

They charged in less than a second, trusting Raven King to come in support.

The young stranger’s laughter crackled in the comm channel, vaguely manic as they parried yet another attack when Greywaren came onto them.

Ronan felt thunder on the tip of his tongue, close enough to taste and yet not coming from inside him.

"That's impossible," Adam hissed, fighting with his handles to keep their stance steady. 

The echo of the very same words, in a terribly similar situation, echoed with Niall’s voice through the drift, coated with fear. 

A new warping arrived a 7.02 seconds after the appearance of the metal coils, according to the Greywaren reporting system. It was half of Greywaren’s best timing, and it was _brutal._

The corner of the screen to lit up with the known-unknown threat of a whole swarm of mecha-wasps right as Raven King crashed onto them loudly enough to make them flinch. The swarm opened up at the impact and then closed off around them again, covering the Jaeger completely. 

_They can’t have the energy to do this._ The dismay of the concept lingered between Adam and Ronan’s mind.

Helping Raven King was out of question, not with the team of assholes right in their face, keeping them engaged. A massive use of Dreamcatcher without a consistent plan for a sure hit was only guaranteed to leave them drained for an unknown amount of time.

They had always known this was a trap, but if the purpose of catching them here had been to _divide and conquer them_ , it was working all too well.

On the crest of this same thought, another obnoxious fit of laughter crackled through the comms. The dialogue window for the videofeed popped up, as insistent and invasive as the Raven King trio was silent and concentrated in damage containment.

“What is it, Wonder Lynch?” the asshole with the hollow eyes egged them on — egged _him_ on in particular. “Too used to your boring grandma rhythm to play warp race with me? Is the legendary Greywaren too _slow_ for this?”

The reality was that they were.

They were, even though the warping-dodge seemed to give some trouble to the asshole that must have planned to catch them with ease. They were, even though Raven King had enough ammo and more experience with the swarm to be able to hold its ground. 

If only the scope of a battle was just to hold their ground. 

“Ronan,” Gansey’s voice came through the drifting interface, with that tone that seemed to suggest, _I have a plan_. “I need the voltage-bearing net we used in 2022 with that Category 4,” he said, precise as only Gansey could ever be, “Also the Assholes keep trying to open comms.”

Following the train of their thoughts, the O.P.A.L. reported not only the specifics of the equipment Gansey was asking for, but also the fact that it was located in Hangar #09897. 

“Fuck, it’s underground, okay,” Ronan agreed regardless, snarling as they kept engaging with the invader Jaeger in close contact. It felt more like a game of cat-and-mouse than a proper battle, and it was infuriating. “Yeah I know we’re on it, but they’re blocked from the drift interface at least. If you want to see Whelk’s shitface, that’s your chance.”

“Jesus, I really wanted that to be a bluff,” Gansey gritted out. The fact that Whelk had been embezzling Corps supplies while MIA had been a much more alluring narrative when it was just as an excuse for Mr Grey, rather than the harsh reality. “I’m sending you the coordinates of where we’ll need the net.”

The battlefield flashed up in transparency, turning in a 3D rendering of Hong Kong in the square kilometer around them. The required positions saw Greywaren pinning the other Jaeger on the right side of an L-shaped armoured building, a blindspot for the high tension electric line that Raven King wanted to drain to supply the warped net. 

“Feels like a placeholder, not a solution, Dick,” Ronan told him, after a quick surveying and assessment with Adam. 

Once again, it felt like Adam’s presence made all the difference. This Jaeger did not move like a Jaeger, but Adam’s tendency towards freeforming paired with the impossible speed of dodging through the warp was making the most in levelling the field of this fight. But they were not close to a breakthrough, and thinking in such an uncharted situation was difficult even with two brains — or five, if one considered the Raven King team.

“We need time to think,” Gansey huffed through the comms, strained in the impossible effort of keeping the swarm off without losing all the ammo.

“Are they chatty?” Henry asked, to the side. 

Adam, who was ostentatiously in the process of tuning out the hollowed-eyed stranger attempt to egging them on about their _dreamcatcher cluelessness_ , hissed, “Insufferable, please torment them back.”

“Greenlight as soon as we reach the positions,” Ronan added, and let the comms fall into the background of his mind, more than his screen.

Dragging this Jaeger off its standing without bombing him out of it was going to be as challenging as warping an object abandoned in an underground hangar. One shot only to win the time they did not even know how to use apart from _not smash the City down_. 

From the Headquarters, unsurprisingly, everything was silent, and Ronan really hoped this was a sign that not even Astrid Gansey, General in chief, had a better strategy.

They spun the spear, dodging through the warp once, twice, with increasing intent, and charged to attack the invaders. Over and over again. 

They were going to do it, one way or another, as they had done most things in the last ten years. 

Somehow, the thought was not quite a hopeful one.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Henry had never felt more incautious and on edge in his life. He would be willing to blame Blue’s attitude, simultaneously stabilising the drift and deciding the approach for all three of them, but in reality it was most likely desperation.

Gansey’s mind was as sharp as usual, guiding them through any step that would have been otherwise unfamiliar, and Blue’s recklessness was courageous enough to keep them all from panicking. Henry was never sure of what _he_ was contributing, at times, but this was not the moment to doubt everything.

_“Comm channel incoming request.”_

He breathed in, sharing his focus with Blue and Gansey, and then out. They looked forward, focused on the swarm, and even more so on the damages that it seemed to inflict every time it came in contact with Raven King’s shielding. Henry let the comms go live.

“Whelk, and here I thought you were done walking around like you owned the place,” Henry spit out immediately, for the matter of principle of not leaving them the first word.

The videocomm window opened, off-centred from the main wide-angle vision of the battlefield. There was an impression of a piloting hutch as mismatched as the rest of the enemy Jaeger, and of two men pooled in a blue hue that was not supposed to filter in the chamber.

“Oh, look, it’s _Ching Ching_ ,” a deceptively sing-songing voice filtered across the comms, rising chills down Henry’s spine. “Did you stop sucking enough to bring yourself somewhere useful?”

On the screen of his Jaeger, in the middle of the utter chaos, Joseph Kavinsky looked right at him with eyes more hollowed in a face more gaunt than Henry remembered — or carefully avoided remembering. 

His spiralling thoughts dragged the drift with them, and they narrowly avoided getting cornered by the swarms only because Blue and Gansey went back in focus as fast as Henry had swayed them out of it. 

“You always know the most pointless people,” Whelk was telling to Kavinsky, evidently not recognising Henry in any shape or degree, or at least pretending excellently not to.

Whether Henry meant it to or not, the knowledge of the _who_ , and the _what_ , and the _how_ simmered closer to the surface, within reach for Blue and Gansey. Their touch in Henry’s memories was familiar, their minds in his mind and his mind in their minds.

There was not anything deep to be told about Joseph Kavinsky. He had been a year younger and three times more invasive than Henry had ever been, and they had ended up in the same class of piloting trainees of the Manila Shatterdome. He had been loud, chaotic, and insensitive, but also sharp enough to know where to hit so that it hurt the most, both in words and in actions. There had been days in which Henry was sure there must have been some sort of mistake in dropping Kavinsky in the piloting division, because he was an unstable, egomaniacal asshole incapable of any ethics. In other days, days in which Henry himself struggled with the essence of the program and the PPDC requirements, Kavinsky seemed the only one to be on track for any sort of success, the only one that understood how to work a system that was not meant for people like Henry, because otherwise why would Kavinsky have such excellent technical and practical performances?

Of course, if there had been any justice in the world, Kavinsky’s toxic mind would have meant that the neural handshake for him would turn into a neural slap in the face, that he would have no partner and die alone in failure. But if the war had taught something to Henry was that karmic justice was for philosophy and books, basically the consolation of the inert and incapable. Joseph Kavinsky roamed around the trainees with four other people, loyal to him like a pack of dogs to the most rabid of them all, and Henry could have sworn they would have managed to synch, one way or another, even if Kavinsky had to wrestle their minds down into submission. Not that Kavinsky had really cared for them — Henry remembered him boasting to anyone who would listen that he would make his way to the Headquarters, one day soon, and into the high-ranks, explosively enough that they would have made him pilot with Ronan Lynch. 

The sudden hindsight that projected that past into this present was enough to make Henry give in to a little laughter — afraid because he was happy, happy of being afraid where he was instead of somewhere else. 

“You ended up piloting a patched up trash can masquerading as a Jaeger with Barrington Whelk, Kavinsky?” Henry laughed out, only vaguely hysterical. “Damn, smashing your head on the rocks of that cliff when the Shatterdome went down would have been an upgrade.”

The snarl was all too known; it was the same Henry remembered from seven years ago. 

Rolling out from a particular brutal blow from Greywaren, the Jaeger shifted on its dislodged articulation in a way that made them suspect that Henry’s provocation had just risked adding a frontal attack to the swarm they were still trying to manage.

The sweat on Blue’s forehead was real on Henry’s forehead too, as she managed the flow of information in a synthetic report towards Greywaren. Gansey’s teeth were clenched in trying to optimise any environmental resource to keep them going without giving away their plan. 

Henry inhaled the sense of threat, ready to optimise their missiles to keep the Jaeger off while Greywaren recovered the lost ground.

He was ready for this, ready to hold the centre of their plan, but he did not need to.

“Fucking hell, Cheng, you could have told me the asshole needed more punches,” Ronan’s voice came through the comms, weidly elated by battle. “The team always provides.”

A glance at their videocomm and at Adam’s wide eyes was the only suggestion that something outrageously violent might be coming. 

Far from being a critical failure, the slightest shift in stance provoked by Henry making it _personal_ turned out to be the opening that Greywaren seemed to be waiting for.

For a second, Henry was sure they were going to toss their spear completely, but Greywaren planted it deep in the asphalt by the enemy’s right leg, using the unnatural bend of the ankle giving in to the shin to create a deadlock. They had barely any grip left on the edge of the spear, but they stepped sideways on one of the armoured buildings, right off the ground.

Greywaren jumped and turned, knee-first, and the enemy Jaeger slowed down three key seconds too long. The impact came with a bang and the electric crackle of additional blast of the internal explosive storage in Greywaren.

It had the combined madness and technical perfection of Adam and Ronan, the best of anything they had ever showed them in the training rooms. A sum greater than the two parts that was the true power of the drift. 

They all regretted not being able to savour the gloriousness of it without having to multitask with aggressive mecha-wasps.

Kavinsky and Whelk ended up propelled hundreds of meters off, and their little dot came much closer to the expected position in their 3D tactical rendering.

Greywaren snatched the spear off the asphalt the second they landed, the ground shaking with the impacts of two Jaegers on it. 

“Make him know exactly what hit him,” Adam said, sharply, along the comms, as they went back to charging. 

Somehow, this felt like more than just a plan — it felt like having a team, backing Henry even from his own memories.

“You do have it,” Gansey replied out loud to the drift. 

They used their own propeller to smash part of the swarm on the same building Greywaren’s foot had left a deep imprint in the metal, and rushed to get closer to their own optimal spot.

They were already losing direct visual on Greywaren and the enemy Jaeger, but the clashing that echoed through Hong Kong told them everything they needed to know on how little ground Adam and Ronan were giving away after having landed a good hit. On the map, the two flashing dots tracked with the radio signal were getting closer and closer to the dead end where they wanted to corner the invader. 

Instead, behind Raven King, the high-voltage tower was looming closer and closer, one not-so-casual smashing of a mecha-wasp at the time. 

“Ready?” Gansey asked, low and focused.

“Steady,” Ronan murmured along the comms. 

He and Adam looked tenser than Henry had ever seen them, their skin almost too pale and lit up by a variety of flashing reporting lights in Greywaren’s hutch. Gansey’s plan was asking for a lot — a Dreamcatcher warping that would end up in their hands instead of Greywaren’s itself — and yet they would deliver. 

“To the three,” Adam declared, when their dots overlapped as well as they could in the forecasted positions.

“Two,” Ronan added.

“One,” they said together, and Henry’s braced for what was coming with another rush of irrational fear.

The air compressed around them in the most subtle change of pressure, like turning a corner and hitting on a gust of wind, with the same sense of barely-there vertigo.

All the recordings of Dreamcatcher in action that Henry had studied in training made him conclude now, in the reality of it, that Greywaren’s brand of magic belonged on camera — too intangible for the real word, slippery to visualise mentally even with its power unleashed above them.

It was far from precise; the object crashed hard against a building and bumped off a billboard. It had still appeared from thin air, though, and for a second Henry could have sworn there was a blue halo visible only the reflections of the windows, before the impact crashed them.

They had to rush for it, through lethally aggressive mecha-wasps — brought to them by something like the dark twin of Dreamcatcher — but their enemy was in the blind, so engrossed in Greywaren’s unleashed violence that not even Kavinsky’s mouth was running commentary. 

When the system bipped furiously in the proximity alert, giving them the perfect trajectory for the catch, Blue sacrificed two of their jet propellers to launch them forward, past the swarm surrounding them. It was a poor approximation of Greywaren’s leaping, and they did not manage to avoid wasps getting plastered on Raven King’s outer shielding, slowly consuming it in spots. Still, the core of the swarm stayed behind them.

The cylindrical container of the high-voltage net was big enough to fit leisurely in a Jaeger’s hand, but it almost cracked over the white imprint of the Pan Pacific Defence symbol under the strength of their grip.

The landing on the high voltage tower was far from elegant, forcing Gansey to guide them in some wild stabilisation maneuvers to avoid sending the body of Raven King right off the edge. The swarm was following close behind them, clustering in a dark cloud of clattering metal ready to fall back down on them.

Henry kept his mind malleable and trusting, so that his body would follow where Gansey would lead them, and concentrated on his own assigned focus: a single bundle of thick cables, meant for supplies and not for connectivity. It was right there, more exposed close to the top of the tower, and Henry polished what was needed to get there in his mind.

They climbed to the top of the electric tower, dragging themselves up claw-first to try and outpace the swarm. 

Blue opened the container and the net unrolled in front of them like a curtain in the wind. 

A single connector uncoiled at the side of the container, meant to energise to the net. Henry jammed it in the high-voltage supply cable of the tower with barely a split fraction of second to check the polarity.

The high-pitched whistle of electricity forcing its way out in an unorthodox way filled the air, crackling and popping like thunder — beside them, around them. 

The net shook, overcharged and ready for the swarm in collision course. 

The _bang_ of the impact echoed in the air, frazzling and popping as more and more mecha-wasps hit the net, stiff with electric current. Some of them fell off, spiralling inertly to the ground, while others remained stuck on the mesh, cracking open and catching fire. 

All around them, down in the streets, the lights of the evacuated shops and of the billboards in the distance flickered.

“Oh fuck yeah,” Blue hissed, kicking one leg to the side to equip the additional ammunition, ready to finish the clean-up of the swarm. 

Over in the comms, Adam and Ronan snickered in one voice.

The only thing left to do would be bring Raven King in support of Greywaren and bring the enemy Jaeger down, and Kavinsky and Whelk with it.

For a second, everything appeared to be on track.

But then there was another crash, off-centre from all the places they had been expecting movement from, and the side of one of the buildings came crumbling down. The enemy Jaeger emerged from the rubble, as if it had gotten stuck in a wall before crawling out of it. 

“The Assholes warped off our hands!” Ronan complained, with Greywaren still out of visual in the angle they had been cornering the enemy. 

Raven King pinned the electrified net to a concrete wall of the building and emerged from behind it. There would be no way to remove it from the improvised power supply and Henry had no assurance the connector itself would not fry off pretty soon. They shot down a couple of residual wasps, as they leaned over the side of the electric tower to see more clearly.

“They are doing a shitty job at it,” Gansey assessed, as the little dot that tracked Greywaren on the map moved to circle the building rather than armwrestling through it and completing the destruction. 

There was something disconcerting about the invader Jaeger after warping, something that was more evident after having seen Greywaren sweep on and off space with the grace of a firelight in the night. The limbs of the Jaeger appeared even more dislodged than usual, to the point that it staggered in its tracks out of the rubble. Something in its incoherently constructed build seemed to almost flicker in the raised dust, as if incapable of stabilising the outcome. 

A shitty job indeed, and a dangerous one. 

When they blew up the comm window from the Jaeger, the hutch itself was difficult to focus on, in a mess of flickering red light in blue hue. Whelk hung heavily in the piloting frame, while Kavinsky seemed to be struggling against it. 

And yet, as Raven King had them in visual, the enemy was seeing the developments too.

“Riiiichard Ganseyyy,” Kavinsky’s dragging felt in equal part delirious and taunting. “You think I can’t keep this going, Richie Rich?”

The Jaeger kicked off a piece of concrete as if they could reach all the way to Raven King with it. They could not, of course, but everything between words and action simmered in chaos. 

Greywaren was emerging from behind the building, already charging up even without tactical advantage. The spear must have broken up in the commotion that they had not seen, and Henry knew — he just knew — that with 15 mere seconds from getting them the net Ronan and Adam would not manage to get new weapons for themselves. 

“I can’t do this again and again until you, your city and your _fucking Corps_ burn off into ashes,” Kavinsky shouted at them. 

There was a slight sense of complaining from Whelk, but it was inconsequential with the outcome. 

The enemy Jaeger spread its arms, a dramatic gesture somehow more taunting when paired with the twitching of disarticulated limbs and the molten front plaque looking at them with a hollow, constant scream.

Greywaren hit them from behind, arms and propellers and violence, but that did not stop Kavinsky.

A new wasp appeared, then another, then five, then ten more. 

Looking intensely at them, Henry was almost sure the blue hue — the hue of the cores, the hue of the Kaiju — was around them, as they bumped into reality with nothing but blind aggression in them.

And just like that, squarely, they were back to where they started.

  
  


* * *

  
  


_‘Dreamcatcher’ status: charging. Next warping available in: 00.00.54._

The report had the aftertaste of mockery, giving how a precarious Jaeger made of spare parts and piloted by two madmen just warped right through a building and materialised another swarm right after. 

Adam looked at the energetics with a sense of dread that echoed Ronan's through the drift.

They were not going to make it. Not if they sacrificed a warping for a piece of equipment that worked but only temporarily. Not without being able to dodge through the warp because they drained everything for their catch.

Greywaren was glorious, Ronan was glorious, and they were still getting _cornered_.

"Where the fuck are you calling this shit from, asshole?" Ronan roared in the comms, without forfeiting his attempt to smash the other Jaeger to the ground with hands and fists.

Another grating laughter crackled through the comms, even though Adam was half-certain how could also hear Whelk groaning, low and maybe a bit pained.

“Oh no, princess, don’t tell me you don’t know how to make your own shit,” Kavinsky cooed, deceptively sweet.

Ronan did not. Niall had not known either, as far as Ronan was aware. And, inevitably, Adam had no idea of anything Ronan’s decennal expertise in warfare could not provide, especially not on Dreamcatcher. 

Considering the tone, and the way he rushed to continued, Kavinsky was perfectly aware.

“Do you want me to teach you?” he suggested, and the click of his tongue somehow echoed through the comms even in the clamour of battle.

Adam had a profound wave of dislike for this stranger that went beyond the fact that he decided to invade their city. Part of it was probably exacerbated by knowing that a personality this chaotic would have probably appealed to Ronan, in another life. Ronan knew it too, or had to acknowledge it in the rebound of the drift, because he got angrier, more tormented.

“Let me teach you first how you get your ass kicked,” Ronan hissed, and though they had never stopped charging, the efforts were now renewed — more ugly and violent.

The brutality of it flew through Adam, sharp and weirdly familiar because Ronan was never more true to himself than in battle, and the drift was always more solid in sheer, unapologetic honesty.

All of his abilities leaned onto Ronan, but he leeched off some of Ronan’s creativity, as he tried to keep track of everything that was failing them. 

They were not going to kick anyone’s ass like this. They were going to lose. And if the last stand lost, everything would come crumbling down after. The Corps, Hong Kong, the cores, the peace — anything Kavinsky and Whelk and whoever was behind them could want, they would get.

It was an option that was no option at all, a type that Adam was very intimate with.

The O.P.A.L. dutifully kept track of all the energetics and a constant flow of reporting for him, but there was no operative suggestion in the depressing evidence that they were lacking the power to rock it. The situation steadily worsened, even, as if the invader Jaeger was a leech draining the very environment.

_‘Dreamcatcher’ status: charging. Next warping available in: 00.00.23._

_‘Dreamcatcher’ status: charging. Next warping available in: 00.00.27._

_‘Dreamcatcher’ status: charging. Next warping available in: 00.00.22._

The flickering of the countdown was not a welcome novelty.

But what would they even warp, knowing fully well that it would be a one-off landsliding everything into an even more devious fight? 

The answer was probably nothing, even more so with Raven King stranded and incapable of coming to support. It was bad enough not being able to go to _their_ support, granting a solid layer of success to the enemy’s tactic of _divide and conquer_.

 _We could try to warp him off_ , Ronan’s mind mulled. But a Jaeger was massive and a feat like this had never been attempted. Moreover, even if it were to be possible, displacing the problem and leaving Raven King behind would not solve it.

In the sharp focus of his mind, he pinned the facts for both himself and Ronan to analyse. 

Their warping was failing, more than their recent patches could fix. _The Assholes_ must have learned how to use a Dreamcatcher even without the generation-three core that they now had. The Fox core was too much for their hardware and it showed, but it was also possible that it was _really_ making it worse.

Recalling Artemus’s blueprints was exhausting, and once again Adam was glad that he could do it in the drift — two brains, two minds, two hearts — rather than breaking his head over it alone. 

Beside him, Ronan was frowning but silent, following Adam’s dissection without complaining about being able to feel him think. He kept guiding them, hit over hit and step over step, to hold their ground, even though they ended up smashing the other Jaeger on the building over and over, bringing the structural damage to an unrecoverable level. They had no alternative but the city might not survive this. 

Adam’s mind glowed with the same bright blue lines he had spent days looking at on a computer screen. The little obscure notes that Artemus had left around. Numbers were common but names were rare. Fox and Raven King and Greywaren had all cores belonging to the _Cabeswater_.

“Opal,” he murmured, following a stray thought before it even formed completely. “Do we have a _Leyline_ protocol?”

“Are you out of your fucking mind!” Ronan exploded immediately, not because he knew the protocol — neither of them did — but because _Adam_ had half a clue of what Protocol Leyline actually entailed. 

Ronan closed off the comms, isolating Greywaren from anything that was not Raven King, whose team had more pressing problems than their altercations. A comm channel request came back immediately — because this Kavinsky asshole was evidently _obsessive_ — but right beside it the O.P.A.L. had blipped with a green tick, in confirmation.

“No! Absolutely no!” Ronan yelled again, even though Adam had not replied vocally, turning towards him.

There was always a first time for everything, and Adam Parrish achieved the impossible task of making Ronan Lynch lose concentration during a fight. 

They took the hit hard, and it was their turn to impact against the building. Somehow the struggle that was regaining their footing and avoiding losing even more ground kind of helped Adam in proving his point.

“Ronan, we can’t go on like this, we have to fix this,” Adam replied, out loud, skipping all the steps that he knew Ronan already followed in Adam’s mind. This, too, was a clear thought for him, but it was worth repeating out loud.

“You don’t even know if it’s feasible! You don’t know anything!” There was a trembling tension along Ronan’s jaw, and Adam had put it there.

Out of pace with the discussion, Gansey’s voice came with strained worry through the drift-harmonics comms. “Guys, what’s happening?”

“Parrish is crazy and thinks he can fix the warping through the core...like, right in the fucking core!” Ronan snapped, intensely uncomfortable. 

Adam sighed and channeled off his frustration, and part of Ronan’s, on the loose articulation of the invader Jaeger’s elbow. “I know it’s possible.”

“Do you?” Gansey asked, after some seconds of skeptical silence. His voice was heavy with effort, as he tried to keep him and his team from getting cannibalised by a renewed swarm of mecha-wasps — Dreamcatcher-wasps — after his plan had failed.

“There is a protocol for it, built in by Artemus, so it must be doable.”

“A protocol of a madman, and you don’t know what you’ll find down there!” Ronan protested, and Adam could hear also what he was not saying: _you’re gonna leave me up here, and the protocol might bring you straight to hell._

“We don’t have any other choice. Losing is not a choice,” Adam declared, uncompromising. 

They both knew he was not going to be easily persuaded, especially without an alternative. Ronan wanted an alternative so desperately it was almost endearing to witness — to feel. He wanted Adam safe, and by his side, and it was more than Adam had ever hoped to find in life. 

It felt like all the more reason not to give up to the destructive whims of two assholes.

The comms with Raven King were respectfully silent, evidently catching the tense moment between a piloting team that was not to be interrupted. The comm with the enemy Jaeger were dutifully interrupted even though attempted contacts kept popping on and off the screen. 

“What am I supposed to do?” Ronan asked, low and guilty, and Adam knew how shame could coil into your stomach like this. He had never wanted to feel like this, and neither wished it for Ronan, who was best fierce and impossible. “You go down, the trio is trying to stay alive, and I keep the Assholes entertained?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“I don’t know if I can do it alone.”

That was a terrible and reasonable point. The Adam before Ronan would have never understood how _don’t leave me in the drift_ could be the only winning argument. No one could understand. Only a pilot, and maybe only Ronan’s copilot, which was Adam’s cherished role.

And yet he had to choose.

“Will _Leyline_ disconnect me from the drift?” Adam asked, out loud, to the O.P.A.L. 

As Opal was a high-performance computing system and not really someone to chat up, the answer came into some flashing graphs and a clearer recollection, disconcertingly straight from Adam’s own mind, of a section of Artemus’s blueprints.

Decoding the information cost them a couple of blows so brutal from the enemy that Adam could have sworn his own knees were about to break, through the neural connection. But they did not, Greywaren kept standing, and the answer could have been worse.

“You’ll stay on…” Ronan whispered, catching on from Adam’s mind. 

“I’ll stay on,” Adam confirmed, though he had no certainty over what Protocol Leylines, in the substance, would bring to the drift. But Ronan did not want him anywhere but connected, and at least for this the lack of choices was welcome. “And I’ll come back to you. I’ll come back.” 

It cost them more hits, but he had to look at Ronan — and Ronan had too look at him. 

Through the horror, and fear, Ronan’s brutality burned, and burned, and he got Greywaren back to its feet to return the beating to the enemy, with intent. He stopped looking at Adam, but he gritted out, “I’m the only one that can handle it up here...and you’re the only one that can handle it down there.”

“I think so.”

“I’ll come and get you. You either return to me or I’ll come to you.” 

No one has ever told something like this to Adam, not even close. Emotions clouded in his lungs, amplified by the drift, and he nodded, because he could not speak — but Ronan would always, always know.

He swallowed hard, and looked forward.

On the other side of the comms, the whole trio of Raven King stared back at him, so busy staying alive, but not too busy to worry about Adam. 

If he could do it, it was for this. If he would come back, it would be to this

“Pilot override,” Adam declared, and the system lit up with the biosignature and voice recognition. _Adam Parrish (B), cleared and waiting._ “Initialise Protocol Leyline on position B.”

Adam steadily let go of mental focus on their own maneuvering, leaving Ronan to decide the course. And Ronan did, as proficient as ever, but kept them skipping away from the enemy rather than engaging — what was happening was too intense, and that was the most he could manage.

Coming up from the suit, the full protective helmet scaled up, covering Adam’s head, his chin, then his mouth, his eyes. Once it was done, Ronan was a figure through the visors. 

Slowly, blasphemously, Adam let the piloting handles go.

_“Protocol Leyline - Active.”_

In the unshakable space that was the piloting hutch, something rattled, even though Greywaren’s motions were steady. 

Adam’s piloting post shuddered too, and then began to fall apart.

First it was the handles, snapping in half and falling to the floor with a heavy clang, and then there was the stepping platform, opening underneath Adam’s feet. From these two points, everything unraveled, scaling off each and every shielding, every framework.

And yet Adam felt the pull of the cables connecting from his suit to the drift interface even more strongly.

At some point, the cables were the only thing holding him up — hands and legs and spine and hips. And then even the cables began to shed, as if they had outgrown their covering and were just snapping it off towards livewire. 

Free from their confinements, the wires came alive, sturdy like branches or vines. They coiled around him, underneath him, and the whole hutch pulsed with the same blue hue that shone off their iridescent surface. 

It was glorious, and terrifying, and Adam was still connected to them.

There were some voices in the hutch — maybe Blue, Gansey and Henry, alert and worried — but Adam could not pay attention to them. 

The connection felt strong, throbbing through Adam’s body starting from each of the unshed contact points. It was tenacious, urgent — a demand, a need, a plea.

“No need to push,” Adam found himself murmuring, looking down at the glowing as if the glowing could look back at him. “I will be your hands...I will be your eyes.”

The urgency persisted, but with an aftertaste of acceptance.

A writing flashed on the screen, “ _Scrying gate - Open._ ”

All the bundle of cables shifted around him, and for a second Adam had the feeling that they went on forever, deeper and deeper into Greywaren’s body, planted in the Jaeger like roots.

Then they flashed, just once, engulfing the whole hutch in their blue hue, and Adam fell right through the light.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Ronan Lynch had never had an excellent grasp on Artemus Elintes. He had known Ronan’s father for too long to be easily discernible, but not long enough to be fundamental, and thus the drift had been able to give him a guide — like a quick handbook for Artemus-related interactions — but not a full substance. With Niall’s death, even the clarity of these directions had gradually degraded into something more questionable, which frayed the fabric that held Ronan’s life together.

In this very moment, with his heart beating in his throat and his vision full of dancing black spots, he did not know if he wished he had _known_ Artemus — deeply enough to know the secrets behind the secrets of his secrets — or that he could just have him around ten minutes to _fucking strangle him_.

Right beside him, in the hutch, the position that had always held the pillars of Ronan’s heart and soul — Niall first, for so long, and now Adam, so new — had self-destroyed into an unrecognisable column of cables that squirmed disconcertingly like the vines of a carnivorous plant.

A plant glowed like Kaiju’s blood and had just swallowed Adam whole. 

Having given in to this plan felt like the deepest of Ronan’s failures — unforgivable, and impossible to face, even though Ronan did not know how to look away.

Maybe, in another life, he would have at least managed to properly panic. In this one, even dread had been shaped into a miliary-savvy form, and Ronan pulled at his handles, swaying Greywaren away from one threat after another, before he even knew what was doing.

“Track him for me,” he whispered. “All his status, all of him.”

He did not address it properly, nor he had thought it properly, but the O.P.A.L. understood him anyway. 

A bright additional window appeared, in first-priority position on the reporting screen, and under the title _Adam Parrish - Pilot B_ Ronan had a detailed streaming of physicals. Cardiogram and encephalogram, blood pressure and temperature, and on and on and on, each and every sign the system could give him. 

Adam Parrish was alive. Alive and still _in contact._

_“Comm channel incoming request.”_

Ronan gritted his teeth through a half shuddering breath and maneuvered Greywaren once again out of reach. “Request granted.”

It was different to pilot like this — alone but not alone, the drift energy still coursing through the Jaeger even though the second piloting spot was just a cylinder of glowing cables reaching from floor to ceiling. It was difficult to discern if they were actually twisting and coiling on themselves, it hurt to look at them too long — it hurt in more than just Ronan’s eyes. Each of his tendons, each of his joints, seemed to grate against each other, and something was pooling in Ronan’s mouth, too thick to be just saliva. He refused to spit and just pressed his tongue on the roof of his mouth.

The comm window opened, and the enemy’s hutch was as psychedelic as before Ronan shut them off — five minutes ago, but an eternity since Adam decided on this crazy plan.

There was a long, appreciative whistle and then a grating laughter. “Oooh Lynch, I can’t leave you alone _a second_?” Kavinsky mocked, and something told Ronan that five minutes had been enough to make him more delirious. “Barry, are you seeing this? Look at this shit, the ace dog of the Corps succeeded where you failed like a little shit!”

Ronan had a marked wave of nausea, but Whelk’s snarking replied covered him from having to showcase it to Kavinsky. “Shut the fuck up, you always talk too much!”

“But why, Barry, are you afraid to tell Lynch how we took seven years to recover from your fuckup?” Another snort, conflicting and derisive. “We can do it while we kick his ass. He already sacrificed his copilot, I’m sure he’ll _understand_.”

The cylinder kept shining, mutable and unperturbed by Ronan’s turmoil. 

Did he just sacrifice Adam? Did Adam sacrifice _himself_?

“That’s what you did to Noah Czerny?” he asked, instead, and tried to not stare too long to Adam’s vitals, because they were still in battle.

Greywaren had already taken so many hits for their distractions that every movement surged through Ronan’s knees as if someone was stabbing him, and yet he kept going.

“Ah! You see, the dog ate someone’s homework and now he knows what’s up!” Kavinsky exclaimed, triumphantly, and swished out of Ronan’s hit. “Barry here is just jealous, he wished he had managed a glowing stick like you. And instead he messed up and we end up with scraps and a sunken Shatterdome to clean up after him.”

“Is that what happened in Manila?” Gansey’s voice came through the comm, saving Ronan from his tormented silence. “Noah Czenry tried to interface with the core?”

Kavinsky tutted, and even through the blurred lights it was evident he was shaking his head. “Richard, Richard, did your Mother not teach you that if you interrupt you get shot?” 

Ronan had a split second of realisation, almost subconscious. They were going to shoot at Raven King, heavily, and Raven King was still trying to manage the new, even more aggressive swarm. He knew the shared stats of their shielding — rapidly deteriorating — and their ammos — reaching critical shortage. 

He moved, and Greywaren somehow followed his urgency. 

One second, he was hundreds of meters away and the enemy Jaeger was charging its blaster. The next, they collided, and the power of a warping leap Ronan had not even intended to take sent them crashing on concrete and rubble. The blast went out of aim and destroyed a building, loud enough to make the speaker from the outside phase the sound out. But it was to the left of Raven King, and not on _them._

“Princess, I’m impressed,” Kavinsky’s voice drawled through the comms, sweet and sickening like molasses. “What have you done with your stray copilot, mh? Maybe I might find a better use for Barry, here...show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

Ronan heard him but not quite; something rang through his temples, beyond the static current of the connectors. 

On the screen, Adam’s heartbeat was steady, paced to a shared rhythm in their pulses, as if he had never gone away. 

Ronan felt him, and did not. He was alone, but he was _not_.

All around him, the drift was starting to _vibrate_.

  
  


* * *

  
  


For some long seconds, everything was blue, blue, blue. 

Adam knew he was falling, because he had started this by going downwards, but the lack of real spatial reference points meant that right now, as it was, he might be going anywhere. 

Anywhere, or nowhere, and he did not know for how long.

He tried to follow his own breathing, to keep a time frame, but he skipped count, before losing it altogether. 

His mind wandered, and there was only one point it could always come back to. Whilst his own breathing did not help, somewhere, in time and space, Ronan was breathing.

_“In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.”_

There was a voice in his head, or all around him. It was a stranger, it was Ronan. It was Niall.

_“Down went...down…”_

Just like that, Adam’s body shuddered, back in himself rather than _beyond_ , and he felt stable in the drift again — wherever in the drift he might possibly be.

All the light that had surrounded him disappeared at once, and for one long second — or a minute, or a day — everything was pitch black, animated only by Ronan’s heart as it beat in Adam’s chest.

Adam blinked, and there was light again.

It was dimmer and diffuse, a blue as dark as a deep ocean with the sunlight confined outside.

Adam was standing, not floating, and he could walk, not fall. 

At first he thought he was in a forest, lithe figures shooting up against an invisible sun. Then he thought it must be in the middle of a monumental patch of seagrass, and the trees were not trees but algae, dancing through their whole length with a current that Adam himself could not feel.

“Why is seagrass different from a forest?”

He was so sure he had been alone, but when he turned around there was a figure half-hiding, half-ogling from behind two crossing algae. 

“Well, I think one is underwater,” Adam considered. And he was not underwater because he was breathing, but maybe he would always breathe if Ronan kept breathing. “How did you end up here?”

“It doesn’t sound like much of a difference,” the figure complained, slightly petulant like a child and about the same size. “How did _you_ end up here?”

How did he, indeed? Adam’s mind wandered again and then refocused, like a wave on the shore. Maybe he could feel the tide that moved the seagrass, just not in his body. 

“I think I asked to be here...but I don’t know where here is.”

“If you asked, then you know,” the child argued. “I didn’t ask and I didn’t know, but I figured it out.”

The figure moved out of the seagrass and into Adam’s view, and he was not so sure anymore he was looking at a child. She — how did he know they were a she? — had the face of one, and the body of one, but she advanced towards Adam in little slippery jerks. When he looked down, there were no legs but just an ensemble of tentacles.

“Who are you?”

“You call me Opal,” she said, and when she smiled her lips split too wide over abundant, shark-like teeth that looked sharper than razors.

 _She looks like a child,_ Adam had thought. But she looked like a Kaiju also.

“What…” Adam exhaled, uselessly, and she looked at him with very little pity for his confusion. 

“You really don’t remember why you wanted to come here?” She asked, frowny and reproachful. “I thought it would be fun to have you in the core, but you seem more brilliant in the hutch.”

“Leyline!” The plan got back in focus, with the usual sudden brutality of the drift, incapable of pacing or introducing concepts with anything less than brutal honesty. “I want to fix the warping directly through the core.”

Opal smiled again, murderous and welcoming at the same impossible time, and swayed on her tentacles. “So you _are_ brilliant,” she murmured, and then frowned. “Kerah is very worried, he wants me to tell him how you live, so I’ll keep a good eye on you.”

She reached over and it did not occur to Adam to draw back. Her grip around his wrists was surprisingly strong, it hurt like the connectors going live — but Adam still had the suit on, the connectors, even the helmet. He just did not know what he was connected to. 

“You mean Ronan? I can feel Ronan,” Adam asked, looking around again. He yearned for Ronan, he realised belatedly. He felt him so close but they were so far away. “Opal, I need to fix this.”

“We’ve known him for a long time, but he has a weird name so we call him _Kerah_ , which is much prettier,” she argued. “Tell me what to do, then.”

“We? How many of you are here?” 

“Sometimes it’s just me.” Another line of teeth flashed. “We like your name, because it makes Kerah so happy and that’s weird too but a nice weird. So we will call you Adam. What do you want, Adam?”

A dreadful question with a dreadful answer, which had accompanied him throughout a whole life with eyes wide open and nothing quite so bright to see. But now he knew, or he thought he knew.

“I want you to show me the path that Artemus had traced. And then I want to fix them.”

It did not sound clear like this, but the AI of Greywaren — which was probably not what Adam thought it was — had always been better at picking up the train of thought directly from his mind, just as Ronan had told him.

Opal swayed again on her tentacles, letting go of Adam’s wrists. “Your call,” she said, voice pitched low, a Ronan’s imitation that made Adam snort. 

Then she spread her arms and the forest-seagrass lit up with the same bright blue that the cables had before they swallowed Adam. Among the alga, a glittering trail extended like the path of an overgrown snail and then emerged with more purpose, a bright path branching along together with Adam’s mind. 

He could not see the whole trail of glowing lines and yet he could, because he had seen it before — on Artemus’s blueprints, light blue on dark blue on big screens. And now he knew where to look.

They walked through, Adam striding on one side of the path and Opal scuttling on the other. She seemed to be capable of going perfectly along these lines, which always seemed to be straight until they intersected and branched, but she seemed oblivious of all the little points in which they smeared out. 

So it was Adam that crouched, and it was not ground underneath but neither was sand or rock. He looked at the line, that was not much of a line but two split segments meeting, like hair frayed at the end — or like uncoiled wires. 

He was good at wiring, he could do wiring. 

He looked down at his hands, still wrapped in the gloves of the suit. There were no tools, no anything, just a Kaiju-girl and shimmering algae. 

He reached over, and coiled the wires by hand, first in turns, then in twists over each other. 

It made his skin shiver, the space under his nails felt weirdly _present_ in a way he was not usually aware of. In another situation, Adam would have assumed a mild electroduction. In this one, he chose to believe it meant it was _working_.

“It is working, because you’re very good and very brave. And also a bit crazy, but I don’t think you can be very good and very brave if you’re not even a tiny bit crazy...your mind would feel so flat otherwise.”

He got up again and kept walking, over Opal’s weirdly comforting babbling. She was never so chatty in the interface of the hutch, but maybe she would be, if for every report signal she could just say something as she was now. 

Along their way, there were more dispersions, more interruptions. 

“Are you a Kaiju?” Adam asked, looked down at the ground that was not quite a ground. He did not like the sound of it but he still had to.

“Do I feel like a Kaiju?” Opal countered, and it was not a rhetorical question, she seemed filled with genuine curiosity over the essence of her own being. And she must be asking about essence, because _feel_ was a very different word from _look_ or _sound_.

 _Feel_ was the only currency the drift dealt in. Bare truth and clarity sharp enough to cut. Adam’s feet tingled as he walked, and he let himself blink diffused through the sensation, looking for an answer.

“No,” he said, at the end. “But you don’t feel like a human either.”

“What is a human like?” Opal asked, and from the way her teeth shone through her mouth as she spoke it she might as well be talking about a food to gnaw on.

“Like me,” Adam pointed at himself — no tentacles, thirty teeth of the usual type though the Corps had removed two of the wisdom ones. No echoing voice, no glittering eyes. “Like Ronan...Kerah,” he added, as it occurred to him that Opal had known his copilot longer and more deeply than Adam himself — it was a weird realisation.

Opal looked up at him, her swaying side to side made more pronounced by the curve of her tentacles. “Are you sure?”

Adam’s mouth dried suddenly, and his heart drummed at the back of his throat. It was his heart, or it was Ronan’s heart, or it was the drift. Opal’s subtle snickering only increased the shivering down his spine.

“We looked at Artemus’s files...the guy responsible for the creation of the cores for the Marks-III...we figured out that he and Niall Lynch probably did xeno-engineering on Kaiju...corpses, I suppose? After battle,” Adam explained, instead of answering. 

“I know it, it’s in your mind so I know it,” Opal reassured him — whether her surveying of the drift was a real reassurance or not — but seemed indulgent over Adam’s need to explain his own train of thought to himself, first of all. “I also know Artemus. He synched with our drift, when we went on the big final mission. The biggest before this one we’re fighting now, I mean.”

Adam ran a hand through his hair. It was hard not to get sidetracked, not to follow the trail in his mind that spoke of battle-adrenaline and instead keep on this glowing line they were walking on. “No, yes, what I mean is...I think they did this to you, and now you’re here, and...sentient. You didn’t sound so conscient in the hutch.” 

“But we are the same, in the drift,” Opal told him, nodding as if that was Adam’s train of thought exactly. Maybe it was, but Adam had not known it. “I don’t remember how it was, before this. But I remember how it was after, as I walked with Kerah and his father. They wanted to stay alive, and I wanted them to stay alive and be alive also. It didn’t always work...but the drift is beyond life, and death, and even war.”

Another run of Adam’s hand through his hair, and then he stopped because somehow the tingling in his hands — stronger every time he realigned the line — made it stand on end. He churned over what was the essence of a war crime, but any notion of ethics he had conflicted with the novelty of aliens — or monsters, or whatever the Kaiju really were. Novelty, and ignorance, and lack of other choices. 

The Kaijus had invaded the Earth, and the humans fought for their lives. And fought to win. The approach had always made sense and did not stop to make sense now. But then there was this third option, the one where a young Kaiju tossed too early through the Rim to destroy the Earth got turned into a core near death. And that felt weird too.

“They had no right to do this to you,” he murmured, even though the alternatives were quite narrow. “Neither the human nor the Kaiju had any right.”

Opal twisted around on her tentacles and reached for Adam’s hands, looking him in the eyes. Both things that Adam had offered, so let her have it, and kept walking as she kept her hurried shuffling even backwards, without any effort. 

“Then we’re the same, Adam Parrish, right?”

Looking back at his own life, from childhood to his very present, Adam did not know how to answer. But he swallowed thickly, and Opal must have known it was probably a _yes_ , because she smiled with her beartrap-mouth.

They went on.

At some point a strand of algae had invaded the path of the line, and as the line seemed incapable of turning around obstacles, Adam had to eradicate it. Opal very helpfully gnawed off all the top part, but then Adam had to pull, and pull, and pull, until the roots became branches, and the branches became wiggly worms, and then somehow he was pulling on running liquid, shiny as quicksilver. 

Further down, the line was literally interrupted. It was subtle, the glowing still carried from one side to the other as if the two segments were shining on each other and that much sufficed. Adam stayed crouched longer, stranded by this puzzle.

“They are too far away and I can’t stretch them towards each other,” he confessed to Opal, who was the only one that talked to him — though maybe not the only one that listened, because at times everything around Adam hummed.

Opal shrugged and said, as if it was obvious, “Then drag the ground from underneath them.”

It was so ridiculous Adam did not know why he moved to comply. It was ridiculous but when he found the right angle of his hands — the angle that made the skin tingle all the way up his elbows — the ground molded down like dough, even though everything else was rock solid. 

The lines connected, overlapping again.

The more they advanced, the more Adam fixed. The more Adam fixed, the brighter the lines became. The brighter the lights became, the more Ronan felt present in Adam’s mind.

A whirlpool of sensations poured into Adam with the contact, and it was disconcerting, for the first time since their first drifting, to not quite understand what linked everything. There was worry, then rage, then a desperate analytic attempt. Then urgency, urgency, _desperation_. 

Adam did not know what to do if not _work faster_ , but it must be worth something because the air felt electric against his tongue. So much more intense, for a moment. He barely managed to drive his hands away when the entire line flared — or shivered. He didn’t manage to close his eyes, though, and the flash of blue-white light caught him by surprise. It left him stupefied, as the line went dimmer and then back to the glowing he had been following before.

“It’s faster and stronger,” Opal proclaiming, nodding wisely with her incongruently childish voice. “You always wanted it to be faster and stronger, are you _happy_?” She tested the word in her mouth, as if she did not really understand its meaning but sympathised with the concept.

“I’m happy,” Adam confirmed — not because he was, but because the concept was more easily conveyed like this. But another concept followed up, dismayed, as he looked how far he still had to go, “I’m taking too long...I can’t leave Ronan alone this long, I wanted this to work but it’s too much.”

Opal frowned at him. She frowned and chuckled — only she was not the one chuckling, and Adam realised it only belatedly.

“You’re actually faster than I’d hoped,” a voice said, from the depths of the dancing algae. “Time runs differently in Cabeswater, and you have a guide. You would have to be here forever, to take too long on the route you’re taking.”

Adam blinked, too fast and with a weird sensation persisting at the back of his eyelids after the flash. It did not help with the disorientation of looking around. There was no one, he was surrounded by a whole crowd instead of algae, there was only Opal. And then he was back in focus and a single figure was standing right in front of him.

Lieutenant General Poldma, who Ronan would have called _Persephone_ , was more disconcerting in a seagrass-forest than she had been roaming the halls of the Shatterdome. Which was saying something, because between her height and her white-blond hair and her unpinnable attitude, she had been a sort of urban legend among the Corps. Completely crazy, completely brilliant, completely gentle, completely sassy. But also, since Adam remembered standing in the Hall as her body burnt down to ashes, _completely dead_.

“Ma’am…” Adam scrambled, but choked on two mere syllables. 

“It’s going to be marvellous, once you’re done,” Persephone said, as if Adam was not panicking, toeing the glowing lines. She was still dressed in a piloting suit, the same one she had been wearing the last time Adam had seen her — flickering on the screen with bad connection during Operation Doomsday. “It’s also going to be challenging. I wish I could tell you how challenging.”

“I’m...I’m just trying to fix the energetics of Greywaren, we...Ronan and I...need to use Dreamcatcher extensively.” Somehow this all felt like an exam at the academy. There must be something about the Fox ladies that evoked similar feelings. 

“You’re doing more than this...Because you needed it, you needed the best, and Opal is guiding you towards the best of the best, or the best of the worst.” If Opal spoke weird, Persephone spoke weirder — but Boyd had told Adam, years ago, that one would have pinned her as some funky philosopher, were it not for her PhD in Physics. “You’re touching Cabeswater, but the three intersecting drifting cores are not where they should be...and that you can’t fix.”

“Cabeswater,” Adam echoed, as a tilt of Persephone’s prompted him to walk with her along the line. “But I’m in the Greywaren’s core...I mean, I thought I was, when I came down, but then I kind of got distracted, I just...isn’t Cabeswater the common interface of all the three last generation cores?”

Persephone sighed, and her hair seemed to sway to the same rhythm as the algae, following a flow that Adam did not really catch. “It’s nice to see you kids finally doing your homework. Ronan has always been so bad at it, but Niall certainly encouraged it...he liked things in his own hands, armwrestling them with Artemus at it,” she said, with Opal scuttering by her side and then flopping over to Adam’s. “They are supposed to be three of the same species, and with Kaiju it means three of the same kind. Niall and Artemus kind of...made them something different, something more.” She brushed a hand on Opal’s head, laughing when she snapped her teeth at her. “But they are still entangled. You know what entanglement is, Adam Parrish?”

His name on Persephone’s lips was the type of recognition he might have yearned for in another moment — so long ago, it felt like another life. Now it filled him with haste, and he had to crouch again and fix what he could as he could, to stand it. “A group of objects interdependent to each other...that remain part of the same system, connected, even if you separate them,” he dutifully reported, feeling himself blush because this was more coming from Gansey than from himself. “It’s quantistic, but...can it work for the whole cores too?”

Persephone smiled again, all mysterious, “Does this place look bothered by flimsy details like these? Tell me what you think.”

It was supposed to be just the centre of the Jaeger, which Adam had seen blueprints of and even supervised the change in containment shielding. Instead, it looked like a whole place in itself, extended like a little universe, and in reality Adam was touching three cores, literally fixing the drifting interface by hand.

“I think we lost the Fox core in too many ways and this won’t be sustainable,” Adam murmured instead of answering to the rhetorical question. They were not where they should be, and Adam obsessed over the concept.

“Sustainability is a problem of timescale,” Persephone argued, serene but a bit jabbing — was it sustainable, to be dead and in the drift? Maybe not forever, but they were not dealing in forevers. “I’ll make sure you’ll take everything you need...but you’ll also have to give something back.”

She had been beside Adam but then she was in front of him, grabbing him by the shoulders and turning him around. The gesture was abrupt and bodily, and yet in the impossibility of this seagrass forest made it fluid. 

There was a clearing a few meters ahead that had not been there the last time Adam looked around. The lines converged there, only to diverge again, and Adam knew there were three different paths and only one was for Greywaren. The algae around shook in a neat, repetitive way that reminded Adam of the composition of laminates on the vent on the Jaeger’s chests, and just like that it was obvious that the current that flowed through the forest was coming _from here_.

“They are all the same, aren’t they?” Persephone asked, with a whimsical inflection in her tone.

“No, I mean yes, but no...they’re all different,” Adam uttered, getting closer.

The drift ran deeper here, and standing in the middle of it was like being surrounded by mountain rivers, flowing deep and humming loud. 

The line of Greywaren called for him, sharp like Opal’s otherworldly teeth, well-loved like Ronan’s smile, and familiar in a way that Adam had never experienced before in his life. It felt better now, so much more consistent, and Adam wanted to dedicate to it still, but the other two felt much more unbalanced, grating like nails on a chalkboard. 

“You can’t fix them all, but you can decide who really leads the energy,” Persephone told him.

The line of the Fox core was glowing in pulses, bursting with bubbles, leeching off the others in a cancerous way. Just like Kavinsky had shown them he could take and take and _take_ , without ever bothering to stop. There was a blackness harbouring in the depths of this drift, though, and Adam knew with a sort of righteous satisfaction that at least here you could not keep taking forever without consequences. 

The line of Raven King still ran like the one that had been connected to Glendower, but that was not true to its nature anymore. Trying to fix it, to find a new path for it, made Adam feel eighteen years old again, with Boyd giving him blind tests on random technology.

“I don’t know where I’m trying to lead this,” Adam murmured, frustrated.

“The reality of the entanglement,” Persephone told him, “is that coming from the same system does not make you less unique. Each of these streams brings something to the ensemble. Just let Raven King lead you towards its own uniqueness.”

It should have made no sense, and to some degree it did not, but with his hands deep into the soil-not-soil and his eyes fixed on the water-not-water, Adam felt it quiver and settle and quiver and settle in promising increments.

Ronan’s was so much stronger in his mind like this, right now, if Adam just let his mind wander enough to find him and settle against him. So adrenalinic, murderous in battle, and there was more urgency, more need for a _fix_ to bring a hope of getting out of a threatening impasse. 

Adam let his eyes roll back, catching onto something so clearly it felt like a vision. Underneath him, Raven King’s drift line started to shine, in longer and longer pulses.

“Do it...make them do it...they have to do it,” Adam whispered, with the same haste that Ronan was sharing with him.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The drift was vibrating. 

Ronan did not want to let go of his handles. If he were to let go, with the Leyline Protocol active, he suspected he would get swallowed down towards the core too. Or maybe, a weird instinct suggested him — in what sounded like Adam’s voice — the handles would float with this vibration and he would pilot but it would not be the same.

“Do you want me to teach you? Mhn? All you’re doing will be useless if you don’t let me teach you,” Kavinsky insisted, snapping Ronan’s away from his twisted thoughts — anxious thoughts, but not quite.

“You have _fuck nothing_ to teach me!” Ronan hissed, and snatched away from the Jaeger’s grip to unleash another blast against it. He had not meant to dodge with the warp while doing it, but Greywaren did it anyway. The curve of the energetics report did not make sense anymore, and Ronan only noticed it now, when he went to glance at them. Adam. Adam, Adam, _Adam_. “And you don’t know _shit_ about what I’m doing.”

The Jaeger recoiled back against the hit but Kavinsky kept laughing. The more manic he became, the more silent Whelk was. _They are very ill-matched_ , Ronan realised suddenly.

“Don’t I? Let me tell you a story, little wardog,” the Jaeger went back to its feet with that dislodged motion that had accompanied it from the start — only more pronounced, because some of the hits were showing now. “Once upon a time, there was a bunch of boooring dudes. They picked up all the stray boys and they said, _You’ll be your own Action Man_! But there was this boy among them, the cleverest of them all, and one morning he woke up and he knew: they’re using us as meat for the butcher! _He said, _We’ll be dead and they’ll take all the glory_. So the boy found the only other people that knew this too, and then, as he was so clever, he went and stole all the plans of the most boring of the dudes, the one in charge of building the butchery. In and out he went. In and out, like a _motherfucking thief__!”

To give credit where it was due, Kavinsky’s love for his own voice must be phenomenal. Escalating the hits did not solve the issue, but after all Ronan did find himself listening. Through the drift-harmonics interface, he exchanged a tense look with Gansey. This was very likely how Manila had gone. Also, Ronan looked at the faces of the trio and knew that between fatigue and skyrocketing level of damages to Raven King’s shielding, they would not hold the line for much longer. The mecha-wasps, conversely, were alive and well and too constantly attached to Raven King for Ronan to try and annihilate them easily.

“You’re so full of shit,” Ronan hissed in reply. “So you stole Artemus’s plans and then fucked up the whole Jaeger they were using for testing, as a _clever fucker_?”

He did not even try to hide the mockery, there would be no point, as Ronan’s attention evidently kept Kavinsky talking.

“I didn’t fuck up _shit_. Blame Barry-head here,” he laughed incontrollably, “Holy fuck Colin was so angry.”

“Will you shut the fuck up, Kavinsky?!” Whelk barked, but his voice was strained by more than battle effort.

“Why? We’re gonna kill them all.” The certainty in it was overwhelming and malignant enough to send a shiver down Ronan’s spine. “We’re gonna kill you, the Corps, the Corps’s reputation...because look how much they fucked up, no no no, this won’t do,” Kavinsky’s head canted, more than shaking. “And then we’ll have your _Dreamshit_ , Lynch, and let’s see how many of you will want to rule the word as it’s meant to be ruled.”

The plan was absolutely maniacal and yet clear enough to make Ronan sick deep in the stomach. 

“You wanted a Dreamcatcher, you wanted it from the beginning,” Henry’s voice came through the comms, panting hard. Maybe it was more than exertion, maybe it was fury. The righteous fury of the collateral damage that lived to see the end of the plan.

“Fuck, _Chin Chin_ , hearing you thinking it’s a painfully slow process,” Kavinsky drawled, with the usual rude belittling he seemed to reserve for Henry. 

Given how busy the trio was in the effort of staying alive, Ronan took the duty of cracking the asphalt under the next hit to the enemy. Greywaren seemed unable to move without warping now, a constant flickering in and out of space that made the corner of Ronan’s eyes hurt, but also made every hit stronger, charged with more kinetic energy than the Jaeger know what to do with. 

“You’re a fucking asshole,” Ronan snarked.

“Takes one to know one, princess,” Kavinsky replied, and it sounded horrifyingly like a compliment. “Aren’t you noticing a tiny bit of a difference now that you sacrificed your partner?” He suggested, full of allusions that made Ronan feel as if he had stuck a deal with the devil without knowing. “If you’d managed to do shit properly we would have won already, Whelk, you _see_?”

Ronan was too trained to throw up, but he definitely wanted to. The fact that his mouth was still thick with the same not-quite-saliva surely did not help. He spit down the platform and refused to look down, even though he was sure he would see black. He looked at the glowing cylinder beside him again, instead. It was so much brighter, now, and the pulse of it reverberated through Ronan’s veins, but Adam was nowhere to be seen. It was nowhere to be seen, even though a part of Ronan kept irrationally insisting that if he just turned around Adam would be there, because Ronan _felt him_ there. 

Doubt was a toxic thing, the type of weapon Kavinsky seemed to wield effortlessly. 

“I could teach you sooooo much stuff. Because you think you know but you don’t...you’ve been spoon-fed all your life, with your little shiny Jaeger, and instead I learnt by myself, _Ronan_.” It was horrible to feel Kavinsky calling his name. More horrible still was knowing that he might really be more capable in using a Dreamcatcher, given the evidence. 

“You have _nothing_ to teach me!” Ronan yelled in retaliation, trying to convince himself also, to some degree.

Kavinsky laughed even louder, “You don’t even believe it yourself. But do let me show you.”

It was so fast there was no time to react. And even if it had been slower Ronan would have not known what to do more than what he was already doing. He kept fighting, dragging Greywaren faster and faster, but that did not stop the enemy Jaeger. It only made something liquid drag out of Ronan’s nostrils, as if his mouth was not already pooled. 

The Jaeger, led by Kavinsky’s madness, spread its arm theatrically, not even bothering to counter Ronan’s hits. It was not needed, for the outcome. Ronan could feel the thunder approaching.

“No!” he screamed. 

But it was a yes, of course.

He turned around and a second swarm of mecha-wasps spread like a cloud around Raven King, appearing from thin air. On the other side of the drift-harmonics comms, there was silence, but Ronan could make out Blue, echoing Ronan’s own plea — a small _no_ that tasted like Ronan’s failure. 

“I made my own dreams, and I could make yours so much louder,” Kavinsky promised, as a ruler of the chaos.

Ronan’s chest was full of a desperate thrumming. He leaped through the warp, taking the questionable decision of abandoning the enemy and its Jaeger to their own destructive devices to at least _try_ and help Raven King. 

He was so fast, but even that was worth nothing. 

When he flickered back into reality, he smashed against a whole cage of metal coils — the same that had pierced through Greywaren to kill Ronan’s father. They had not been there before, but they were there now, filling Ronan with panic and enclosing Raven King into a forced contact with the swarm, now big enough that it covered the massive Jaeger completely.

“Don’t go running away now, Lynch,” Kavinsky hissed, and tried to warp as well, close to him. The result was poor, dislodged, almost sickening to watch. It was like the Jaeger dragged itself through space, rather than jumping, and the faint blue glow that came from its shielding was flickering. “Once they’re dead, let’s discuss you joining us. I can show you how it’s _really_ done.”

Gansey did not have anything to ask of Ronan, no plan to communicate, no proceedings.

Ronan was ready to scream at him for his silence, for the rising horror of losing him like this, in the clear display that Kavinsky had just been toying with them — that ten years of war with the Kaiju meant _nothing_ against a madman that just wanted to feed off the world they had saved.

“Ronan,” Gansey’s voice cut through, urged but not just terrified. “Something is happening.”

Was it? Through the sheer panic for some long seconds Ronan had only managed to hit back on Kavinsky and Whelk, and it felt normal that he could not really hear, could not really see. But then Gansey spoke and it seemed to come from really far away, filtering in the fuzzy feeling that pressed down on Ronan. 

He blinked.

The whole hutch was filled in a light blue hue, and the cylinder at Adam’s piloting spot glowed like the fuel elements of a nuclear reactor. 

The drift had never been stronger. It was so strong Ronan did not even recognise it.

_Do it._

“Adam?!” Ronan called.

_Make them do it._

Ronan felt him as if Adam was talking directly on his face, but Adam was nowhere to be seen.

“Do it!” Ronan screamed through the drifting-harmonics, trusting mindlessly even though he did not know what was asking of the Raven King trio.

“What?!” Henry asked, and it was a very sensible question.

“Ronan it feels crazy!” Blue told him. “There is _something_ , in the drift.”

_They have to do it!_

“Fuck if I know!” Ronan screamed back. “Adam says to do it, just _do it_!”

Silence, not even lasting the span of one of Ronan’s erratic heartbeats. 

Then Blue, Henry and Gansey screamed, visceral enough to churn Ronan’s stomach as he struggled to put the field view into focus.

_Boom._

Hong Kong trembled under Greywaren’s feet, and one of the sides of Raven King’s death cage blasted open. 

The black metal coils shattered like glass, and a whole fraction of the swarm projected off before falling onto the asphalt, crumpled and unresponsive.

_Boom._

Another blast, another section of the shell opening, with a brutal and almost surreal efficiency. Ronan warped off on share instinct, and yet some of the smashed mecha-wasp caught him. The enemy Jaeger was not that fast — so strong in materialising stuff, so useless in warping — and Ronan watched them get part of the hit with a certain stupefied satisfaction.

_Boom._

This third and final one, Ronan got to witness in all its impossible glory.

Raven King lifted an arm, elbow bent and forearm sideways, and a whole flat surface spread in a circle, meters-wide and glowing of the same light that invaded Ronan’s hutch. It was a shield but also a mirror, projecting off anything in the surrounding with brutal energetic efficiency. 

The last blast razed to the ground everything that Kavinsky had conjured around them. Three seconds to destroy everything that had kept them in check for what felt like _ages_. 

When Raven King’s arm lowered, the mirror-shield seemed to mold back onto the Jaeger itself, diffusing out on its silhouette. Raven King stood proud in the middle of the destruction, and something pulsed under all the shielding the mecha-wasp had irreparably cannibalised.

The drifting energy was so thick Ronan could almost _taste it_.

There was a low, subdued chuckle along the harmonic comms and Gansey whispered, “ _Now_ we’re talking.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Around Adam, everything was humming. 

The ground hummed, the algae hummed, the air hummed. For Adam, who stood in the middle of the intersecting lines, it was crystal clear that it was the drift that was humming — and everything hummed with it because nothing around him would exist without it. And maybe, since Adam was right there, he himself would not exist either, so he was glad to feel his sternum thrum with the same beat.

The light was hurting his eyes, but he could not look away. 

“It’s so much stronger, like this,” Adam whispered, in a dumbstruck awe, to Persephone.

“This is the real nature of it,” Persephone nodded, understanding. Next to her, Opal looked even more impossible and feral in the light blue glow. “No one ever did this, up close, so we always worked through approximation before.”

“And closing the Rim brought the drift out of focus,” Adam finished.

It was all so obvious, an otherworldly energy coming from another world, and on Doomsday they had crashed its gate closed. But it was fine, it was fine, every physicist knew what tunneling was: with the cores active, the energy could jump even through a closed wall, finding a place to land. 

The drift lines of Raven King flared — once, twice, thrice, always perfect in threes — and Adam smiled privately for Ronan, who was not there to see him but was _with Adam_ where it counted.

His vision blurred but he kept staring at just one point, unblinking, because among all of this there was a simple spot that kept driving Adam’s attention. And it ran deep, so deep that Adam knew instinctively that he would have to fight to reach it.

“It will be a lot,” Persephone warned him, constantly aware of Adam’s train of thought in the same way Opal could always divine what Adam needed.

“Well, I can’t let him have all this energy too,” Adam argued, looking at the line that sourced the Fox core. “And it’s like you told me, it won’t stay stable, they compromised it.”

“That they did,” Persephone sighed, with her lips pressed in a thin line. “I can’t tell you what will happen, though it will probably bring what was the special feature of the Fox Jaeger...and its core...closer to you and Greywaren. But I can tell you that it will hurt.” 

_Hurt_ was a pivotal concept in Adam’s mind, the baseline of his existence, the most fundamental of his experiences. Hurt is what you get _just because_ , a pointless exercise in maliciousness that would just have to be endured. Adam was good at enduring. 

_You’re kind of sturdy._

Ronan’s voice echoed through the humming and the bright light of the drift dotted with the memory of it — with the frowny, forbidding expression with which he had said it, and then the earnest, profound way he had looked at Adam.

Adam’s chest ached, and expanded, and his desperate heartbeat added to the drift, too.

Ronan was the only thing in Adam’s life that had come as a borderless reward in exchange for a very moderate discomfort. 

“Give me two seconds,” Adam murmured to him, entrusting the message to the humming air. “I’ll be right up.”

He knelt down and reached forward, diving his hands right at the edge of the line. 

It was so intense that for a moment it felt like nothing — nothing at all, as if it had projected Adam right out of his body. 

The first thing that came after was the sound, which he only belatedly realised came from himself — screaming. Then there was the burn, because if Adam had thought his body learned something in years of mechanical work, and then some Jaeger piloting, he had not properly accounted for this — like fire, or liquid nitrogen, or both, running off his palms. Finally, there were his eyes, tearing up with the impossible compulsion of staying open — but there was no other way, not if Adam wanted to see where this went, where it would go, and bring the two together.

In all this, his mouth felt pooled with something thick — dark, if dark could be a sensation — and Adam had a flash of the wetness trailing on the ground, even though he had not spit. 

It was not his mouth, it was Ronan’s mouth. The pain was his pain, though, his deal, and Adam did not want it to be Ronan’s pain. Maybe this could not something he could bargain for, he realised, as the protective visor of his helmet exploded, all outwards, in front of his eyes. But if his back stayed straight, and air kept filling his lungs, it was because Ronan was keeping him up. 

The line nudged, most subtly. 

Adam could only pray it would be enough, that the balance would tip sufficiently, because he could not force it any further.

He snatched his hands away and the next thing he knew his back was on the ground, and he was staring upwards — unseeing, and yet seeing too much, very little of which was really around him.

Opal was, though, standing next to Adam and looking down on him.

“When the time comes, are you ready to do what you have to?” She asked

Considering that Adam had very much just done, once again, what he had to, he was not sure he was really understanding the question.

Unfazed by the lack of answers, Opal smiled another one of those smiles full of teeth. Adam’s mind leafed through memories that were surely not his own, and her tentacled child-like figure overlapped with a Category 2 — or a baby of a Category 4 — roaring in the sea, in the middle of a nighttime storm. 

“Because I am, you know?” Opal went on, pushy in a way that was probably supposed to be encouraging. “I’m ready to go, now that I saw all I wanted to see. I’m ready, so don’t be scared. And be ready too, Adam.”

Adam wanted to say something back — or at least get some time to process things — but he was stuck by the sensation of Opal’s tentacles wrapping around him and pulling, hard.

He fell, but he also flew, and then there was darkness and light.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Dust from the crumbled buildings around the epicentre of their fight still lingered in the air, as Raven King stepped out of the last residue of the cage that had enclosed it. 

There was a suspiciously stunned silence from the other end of the comms from the enemy, and Ronan would have smirked — or tired to smash them on the ground again — if his head did not feel pulled in too many directions as it was.

He saw it a slow-motion, like a training footage rather than a battle that was really happening in front of his eyes. 

The Jaeger flayed its arms again, Kavinsky screaming through the comms, and yet another stream of black, metallic wasps projected forward towards Raven King. It was less than before, and slower, but the result would have probably been still the same. Every piece of the Raven King’s shielding that had been broken flashed like a warning, and then, one meter before full collision, the shield expanded again and reflected the swarm right off.

“Lyyyynch,” Kavinsky hissed, furiously. “What the fuck have you done, Lynchy Lynch?”

In an ideal world, Ronan would go and attack them now, but he was having problems coordinating his thoughts, as if something too heavy was dragging them. He felt the weight of Adam against his body, akin to the sensation Ronan had felt on the cargo when Adam had fallen asleep against him — only now they were both perfectly awake, Adam was maybe _too_ awake, and sucking away Ronan’s mental focus.

When Kavinsky himself went to attack, though, Greywaren dodged through the warp right out of the way, before Raven King could even think about coming in support. It just happened, beyond Ronan’s control, and he would have called it effortlessly, be it not for the sensation of something liquid sliding out of his ears.

He knew it would be black, and thick, and in his mind it always smelled of its father’s blood pooled in the hutch, even though now it was spotlessly clean.

“Ronan?” Gansey’s voice came through, and maybe it had not been the first time. “Ronan what is happening? Are you okay?”

“Yes...no...I don’t know…” Ronan slurred out, mouth too dense for his tongue. It was a bit pointless, but he said again, “Adam is doing something…”

“Yeah, holy shit, I think we noticed,” Blue had all the right to be awed because the mirroring thing had been phenomenal. Ronan wished he could appreciate it properly, without the effort of having to keep Greywaren live, too active, and half-alone.

The enemy charged again, and Ronan found himself and Greywaren diametrically opposite to where he had been a second before, with ease. He stared blankly at the comm window, and it was not sure it was of much consolation that Whelk appeared to be _oozing_ black — not if Ronan himself was probably approaching to the same end. 

“You’re not playing by the rules, Ronny, I told you I would _teach you_ ,” Kavinsky insisted, in the comms, and his voice drawled in a way that made Ronan sure he might not be the one bearing some weight from whatever was shifting around.

 _That’s because you don’t know the rules_ , someone suggested through the drift. It was not Adam, which should have terrified Ronan, and instead he dutifully reported, with some poetic license, “You don’t know the rules, asshole.”

“I know the rules better than you ever could!” Kavinsky screamed through the drift.

“We’ll keep this fucker off you,” Henry promised, as Raven King charged to intercept the enemy Jaeger before it could charge again. 

Ronan appreciated the sentiment, because moving was becoming difficult, but he knew that it would not be easy, not with the way the enemy Jaeger seemed to become more and more dislodged as its pilots spiralled into madness. 

“Is Adam coming back? Soon?” Blue asked, full of urgency.

Ronan wished, desperately, but _feeling_ Adam somewhere in the drift did not mean having an answer.

“Stay focused,” a voice came, urging. “What happens when you drop nitroglycerine into a car?”

“That you have a death with and you’re fucking asking for a bomb, trust me I know,” Ronan replied mindlessly.

“And?”

“And you kickstart the engine so much the car feels like a rocket.”

Ronan turned around, forcing his vision to clear. 

In the bright light that pulsed from the cylinder of vines, Noah Czerny stood almost casually. With one shoulder leaning against Adam’s transmuted piloting post and an old-fashioned suit on, he looked exactly like Ronan remembered. And yet he was fundamentally different, both more corporeal and defined and more haunted. 

When he turned around to exchange a pointed look with Ronan, the sight was petrifying: a whole side of his face was sunken at the cheek, and blackness threatened underneath it, expanding to his left eye. The right one was still clear, bright, and even though Ronan had seen his pictures from Manila — his clear, light blue eyes — its colour now looked too similar to the shining of the vines beside him.

“Exactly,” Noah replied, as if oblivious to any shock. “You know, I had a sister, and she always used to tell me I was a firecracker. They kind of used me as one.” 

He turned around only after, circling Adam’s post, and went to place himself in plain view of the comm camera.

If Ronan had been stricken, the hollowed scream that came from the enemy hutch was downright _terrified_ , enough to swallow the gasps of surprise from Raven King three times over.

“Hello, Barrington,” Noah said, with a glint of sick satisfaction as the screaming exacerbated Whelk’s oozing, and his figure in the comm window started crying in the same black gooey substance that shimmered in Noah’s cheek. “How do you feel now that _you_ are dying?”

The vines flashed again, and maybe they could be gleeful of the slab, or maybe there was some other Adam-madness going on somewhere, because Ronan’s heart thumped double time in his chest. For yet another time in his piloting career Ronan had to thank the harness for holding up instead of letting him fall. 

Adam was in his mind, definitely, but more like a crazy underwater whirlpool than tangled presence Ronan always associated him with, in the drift. And yet, when he touched Ronan’s memories, it felt like his hand felt, running through shaved hair.

With the same unpredictability of the drift, as Adam plucked out fragments of a battle, a Kaiju, a death, Ronan got a recoil of another tragedy, clearing in his mind as if he was the one living it, _right now_.

 

_A hangar, not a battlefield, but everything is still broadcasted through a screen. Cables, containment shieldings and sensors, everything worthy of a testing ground. Even the hutch is almost rudimentary, no finery, this Jaeger is barely fit for battle but it’s plastic enough to allow for innovations._

_Along the neural handshake — or the drift, as they had started to call it now that it is becoming more than just a network — Barrington feels as groggy as he had for the last month or so, his thoughts slippery like water through the fingers. But today you’re groggy too, a peculiar tingling at the back of your throat that makes you feel like you’re about to throw up, soreness in the rest of your limbs._

_The facts are: you suspected Barrington might have been using drugs. Confronting him gained you nothing, your higher officer told you he would investigate but you can’t manage to signal to him that there is something to investigate now, because maybe you’ve been drugged too. Was it the water? The dinner? The aircon itself?_

_They’re testing something, as usual, the Head of the RDI from the Headquarter codenames it as The Tree, which sounded rather silly until the first time you felt it through the connection and it was really like roots spreading. Demanding and welcoming._

_They’re testing something but the attendance on the control bridges is different from usual. You take so long to notice, and by the time you do there is the civil war through the hangar. All the officers you recognise are outnumbered, shots are fired even though the Corps rarely use weapons on their own. There is blood and screams and you know, of course, that this testing hangar is top secret so nothing will be reported._

_You know, also, that Barrington is not surprised._

_“Noah,” he tells you, “Don’t you want better than this? Than being lab rats?”_

_“We’re saving the world,” you tell him._

_“Let them save the world, they know how to already, they’re just playing with toys and we’re their toys too. And when the war is won they won’t know what to do with all this power.”_

_“Are you out of your mind?”_

_Trying to sound the alarm is pointless, the comms are isolated. You should have guessed, done something earlier, but you’ve never been this kind of soldier and now you don’t know what kind of soldier you can be._

_“We can get it for ourselves, whatever they’ve been looking for, don’t you want to try and get it?”_

_You don’t. He spirals, angry and drugged and uncompromising in his madness. Because he doesn’t want to fight this war, he just wants the spoils of it and glory after. You feel it with more clarity than any neural handshake ever — “Oh,” you think, “so this is the drift” — right as he gets out of his harness, hands out of his handles, straining off his platform._

_That’s not how a fight in a piloting chamber is supposed to be, but you fight with Barrington with fists and kicks and bites, still connected to the interface. So you feel it, that he wants you dead — or more than dead, useful, to get him a Jaeger that can dream. This Shatterdome will go down, and no one will remember, and they will get what they want, for something more than “flimsy heroism”._

_You don’t want to go. So you fight, but Barrington has always been stronger and when he smashes your head against the hard edge of the handles, you fall. You don’t want to go. But he tosses you off in your piloting post and everything starts to morph as you go down. You don’t want to go, and since you still feel him, Barrington must know this perfectly._

_The drift is understanding. But you were sent here, and you’re dying, so it’s gonna take you. Everything you have to give — a whole life behind you, the one that was ahead of you, your personality, your unwillingness. Your dreams, too, that’s very important — the drift takes._

_It’s a force out of this world, and it’s beautiful. It’s a force so it belongs to any world, actually, and you wonder if it will change this one too._

_You don’t want to go, and the drift takes it into account._

_You’ll find Barrington in the drift, at some point. And you will go when you’re ready to._

 

“You’re a fucking monster!” Ronan screamed, his vision barely clearing. The critical shortage of ammunition and the black gooey substance running down his ears and pooling in his mouth did not deter him from warping through and blasting a hit on the enemy Jaeger, helpfully stalled by Raven King. “You killed him! He was your copilot and you killed him!”

Whelk did not reply — Whelk did not seem totally capable of replying — and Kavinsky gave a little broken laughter, manic even under exertion. “That’s how it works. That’s how it always worked. You think your magic robots came at no price at all?”

“Not that price!” 

Noah paid it, unwillingly, and paying it had built whatever variation of a cannibalised Dreamcatcher Kavinsky insisted on using. Nevertheless, he stood with the same forbidding casualness in Greywaren’s hutch, looking smugly validated by Ronan’s blind rage.

“Adam really played a number today,” Noah considered. “He’s coming back, Ronan. Are you ready?”

It was a promise sweet enough that it made Ronan want to cry, amidst all these screams and fury. He did not want Adam to come back into a battle, but he would not use Dreamcatcher with him trapped — tangled — in the drift somewhere. So waiting was a must, and fighting was also. 

Luckily, he did not have to wait too long.

The light in the hutch pulsed in a wave, like the surface of a pond after someone had tossed a stone into it. Then everything went dim, and in contrast with all the shining that had preceded it, the hutch appeared almost dark.

The vines — or branches, or tubes, or cables, or limbs — uncoiled, from the bottom up. 

Adam Parrish — Ronan’s copilot, friend, marvel, frustration, soulmate — reappeared, from the bottom up.

It was first his legs, spread wide and grounded as if the piloting platform had not morphed into something unrecognisable. Then his chest, bent forward, and his head, lolling down as if to soften the impact of a fall. He had to wrestle a bit for his arms, pulled high behind him by vines that seemed to be reluctant to let go. Eventually, there was just him, the visor of his helmet broken and the suit damaged in odd points, but there was a strength in his posture that lingered in the air. 

“Adam?” Ronan swallowed deep.

Adam’s fingers were vaguely blue, as if on a principle of hypothermia that came with the same glow of the Jaeger’s core. The veins trailing from knuckles to wrists were more prominent than Ronan remembered, bluer than he remembered also. “Hi, Ronan,” Adam said, and though his voice echoed deep in the hutch it was the same as usual, “Sorry for the wait.”

He reached for the live-wired skeletron that was left of his piloting post, mostly made of cables now, of the vines. In a concerted move, they more than happily coiled around to give the second pilot of Greywaren something to pilot with. When Adam touched the contacts, it was like sending a shock through the neural connection, reanimating the drift in the _here, now, this, this, this._

It was an avalanche of memories, all their recent present sharing in fast forward. Adam’s present felt so much longer than Ronan’s, as if he had not only spent his time in an impossible place, with impossible feats, but he had also been there for longer.

Ronan blinked through it furiously, disoriented.

Adam turned to look at him, and he seemed just as fierce, as overwhelmed. But there was a light shining at the very back of his pupils, and something in his face was more uncanny — stronger, father away. 

Ronan’s heart beat furiously for it — for _him_ — and just like that their drift restabilised, running twice as wide and ten times stronger. 

“Holy,” Ronan murmured, “shit.”

This was going to be wild.

  
  


* * *

  
  


There was something very wrong going on in the Greywaren’s hutch. 

There had been for a while, honestly, since the moment Adam had disappeared in a spiral of glowing unshed cables. It had filled Blue with anxiety — _this is it_ , she thought but desperately tried not to broadcast through the drift, _this is how you lose a battle_ — but it was worse now. 

Worse but better, because at least Raven King was free to move. With no ammo, critical damage to the shielding, and pilots worn out by having to keep the Jaeger in check through an onslaught of cannibalising mecha-wasps, being free was not much but she would take it over the alternative.

Truth be told, after all, there was something wrong in each of both hutches. 

Maybe Blue’s mind was just blowing everything out of proportion because she could not see with one eye — swollen and full of blood trailing down her face — and she was afraid that the pain radiating through Henry meant he had shattered his ankle. 

Maybe it was because whatever Adam had done to the drift — to Cabeswater, that was each and every drift according to Artemus — still soared through her veins. She felt amplified and yet untouchable, like a Faraday cage struck by lightning, charged just on the surface and placidly consistent on the inside.

“Ronan?” Gansey was calling, again, but it was clear that Ronan was diverging. 

They had been anxious for Adam, and now they were anxious for Adam _and_ Ronan, who had black liquid running from his ears and from the corner of his mouth. Darker than blood and terribly echoing what was happening to Barrington Whelk, on the other side of the comms.

Then Whelk screamed and Noah Czerny was leaning against Adam’s destroyed piloting post.

“Fucking hell!” Henry’s teeth clattered, and his commitment to being afraid, but _afraid and happy_ seemed to be stretched too thin by the excessive memories of his earlier years in the Corps. 

Raven King was desperately trying to contain the enemy Jaeger, to avoid Greywaren’s reflex of warping out of harm's way and weighing down on Ronan in an unbalanced drift in the process. But there was little they could do, without some proper weapons, and she did not wish for the Headquarters to risk other officials to deliver them: they were already failing in keeping Hong Kong safe, they would at least avoid decimating the Corps.

Dreamcatcher was the only option — and it would only be an option when Ronan would be able to hold it.

“You’re a fucking monster!” Ronan’s voice was an explosion of rage. “You killed him! He was your copilot and you killed him!”

They were missing pieces, but Noah Czenry was there — terrifyingly corporeal like a walking, talking corpse — and Blue really suspected what the train of thought could be.

Moving out of the way from Greywaren’s blast was the bare minimum to do, but evidently not enough. The plot of the enemy’s presence, the enemy’s scope, was fragmented in their eyes, and the mystery surrounding the Jaeger themselves only seemed to thicken. 

“I don’t know what to do,” Gansey had to confess, out loud, as the rest of the situation spiralled around them. If it sounded like a big deal, that was because it _was_ : Gansey always knew what to do, or was at the very least willing to hold whatever line necessary.

“Just wait a second.” 

It was a gentle but cryptic suggestion, lingering in the hutch like a distant murmur. Alongside it, Raven King started to receive an exponential amount of data, as schematised as everything that Greywaren summarised through the drift, even though Ronan could not possibly be in shape for reporting.

“No…” Blue murmured, uselessly.

Persephone Polma stood at the side of the hutch closer to Blue with the same casualness she always entered her childhood bedroom right when Blue was sure she would burst out crying. The call was fairly close now, as her vision blurred through tears, confusing the details of Persephone’s piloting suit and the deep, unnaturally darkened veins that climbed along her face, contrasting with her almost-white hair. 

Gansey exhaled a strangled sound and Blue felt his heart breaking right alongside hers. He had never felt closer than this, somehow, and this time she was crying and he was holding on.

“I thought I could come and say goodbye, before the end,” Persephone said. “You have all the intel, now. You should compile a black box for them.” Neither Gansey or Blue replied, but in the back of her mind she could sense Henry desperately complying, and the awareness of what Ronan saw — what he deduced, what he _felt_ — ran through all three of them. Blue wished that she could be grateful, that she could _focus_. As if she could hear the desperation, Persephone whispered, like a secret, “It’s always better in threes, isn’t it?”

Blue did not want it to be better in threes, not if it meant that Maura and Calla were now just two, but she did not know how to say it without sounding like the petulant child that Persephone was all too used to dealing with, even in the middle of the battlefield, trying to hold the centre with her trio.

“I already said my goodbyes to Maura and Calla, and they know where my heart is. But I thought I’ll say goodbye to you, and your boys, one last time before the end,” she moved off and Raven King lit up with her steps, so damaged but more energetic than it had ever been. Towards Gansey, Persephone had the same smile that she reserved to family, and now it was not a surprise, “You’ve been very good, Gansey. One last stretch now...don’t be afraid.”

All the layers of her love could remain unsaid, glittering in the drift. It was the memory of Blue on her lap on a rocking chair, reading the same indiscernible PhD thesis in Physics that Gansey, years later, kept struggling to get explanations for. It was the sweet way she looked at the three of them, Blue and Henry and Gansey, and smiled serene and satisfied. 

One second after, she was gone as if she had never been there in the first place.

Off inside Greywaren, Adam was materialising out of a bundle of vines like a technological Daphne in reverse. Even in the imposed distance of the drift-harmonics comms, he looked surreal — too bright, too powerful, too _unleashed_ — and Blue was not so sure if she was scared or fascinated by him, even though Ronan looked on the verge of a religious experience.

Unlike Persephone, Noah was still very much a persistent presence in the Greywaren’s hutch, sitting down between Ronan’s pristine posts and Adam’s dismembered one. His presence seemed to be more than sufficient to send Barrington Whelk spiralling into a panic attack — and this, unlike a lot of other things, Blue did not find him guilty for. Noah was there to haunt him, decaying in front of their faces and yet impossibly animated by the same energy of the drift — the drift to which Whelk had forcibly sacrificed him. So it was good, like justice, if that was working.

There was a string of profanity from Kavinsky, who spit more than his appalled disgust at Adam’s reappearance — his teeth were covered in black oozing liquid, the same that had stopped trailing off Ronan. He seemed oblivious to the fact that both Raven King and Greywaren had muted the incoming communications, even while keeping the enemy broadcast open.

“I hope you liked my present, guys,” Adam said, smiling a little devious — somewhat shark-like, with too-bright teeth and glowing eyes.

“It was phenomenal,” Gansey admitted, still blinking tears out of his eyes after Persephone’s disappearance. 

Blue was glad, once again, that there were three of them, so she could focus on exquisitely practical stuff, Henry could process the amount of information he was transferring to a black box, and Gansey could actually talk and plan something.

Fifteen seconds before, Ronan had looked on the brink of collapse. Now, he bounced in his harness with a barely contained energy that seemed more than proportional, “Cool, because I owe us all some _fucking weapons_.”

From every footage Blue and Henry had ever seen, and every battle Gansey had ever partook in, Dreamcatcher was a rhythmic art — one thing at a time, one of each kind. Their enemy had already subverted most of these rules by having things apparently _created_ in the warp. Now, when Greywaren widened its arms in a clear mockery of Kavinsky’s gesture, the Dreamcatcher adapted to the new pace. 

It was like thunder striking sideways, the air contracting around them with Greywaren as a focal point. Through the junctions of Greywaren’s shielding, a flash of light moved like an undercurrent.

And then there was a stream of weaponry incoming, an instantaneous replenishment of any equipment they had lost or consumed during fighting, and some. 

Ammunition sockets skyrocketed, blaster recharged, broken blades and teasers snapped back into place. 

Blue looked at it as if half-awake in a dream herself, because Raven King did not even require their aid to accommodate everything that Greywaren was providing. In front of them, Greywaren’s shieldings and equipment sockets opened and closed like the ruffling feathers of a bird in the wind, and at the end there were just two spears, gravitating around them before planting into the concrete beside the Jaeger, hard enough to make the ground rumble. 

“Help me tackle these assholes, Gansey,” Ronan called over the comms, his voice vibrating with more than just the effort of the recent feat.

Gansey’s glee at the announcement had an aftertone of vague hysteria, after Persephone’s appearance, but his laughter was genuine enough to propagate to Henry and Blue as he said, “Oh fucking hell _yes_.”

They charged together, finally focused on the same target, and with enough fire to discharge to hold the enemy Jaeger between them. Even then, as they started to close off amidst the rubble of destroyed buildings, it became evident that Kavinsky and Whelk had no intention of going down easily. 

There were wasps, and coils, and disjointed warping that never brought them very far but always sufficiently out of reach.

Raven King’s newfound mirroring ability kept flaring up to shield them, destroying everything that got hurdled at them, and Greywaren flickered in and out of reality with more smoothness and constancy than Blue had ever thought possible before. 

“The Assholes keep being more slippery than an eel in a pond,” Henry gritted between clenched teeth. 

“Yeah and it’s kinda making me want to crush them,” Blue admitted, as if the rest of today was not enough to harbour homicidal instincts towards them and whoever brought them to be.

“It will work, they can’t hold it. Look at them” Adam said through the drift, and it was almost a whisper, but it reverberated intensely.

True to his words, Whelk was bloodcurdling to look at in the footage, with black gooey substance running off his mouth at every hit, every creation, every clumsy warp. Whatever contamination this was, it was worse than Ronan ever accused while piloting alone. It was spreading through Kavinsky, also, and far from being more stable together they seemed to spiral more and more into reciprocal damage.

“They’re killing each other off,” Gansey whispered under his breath.

Somewhere in the Greywaren’s hutch, Noah was watching with rapture and both Adam and Ronan looked down at him, before looking forward again with even more determination.

“Let’s get this clean, though, let me try something,” Adam said, piloting with too wide eyes and a disembodied bundle of shining cables. “They stole the Fox core, but they’re in Cabeswater now.”

The shiver started along Henry’s spine, continued on Blue’s, and ended up on Gansey’s. Ronan should have no business looking as excited as if they were about to somersault over a cliff, and yet he did.

The cables around Adam lit up again, and every time the line blurred they looked more like vines or tendrils from the deep ocean. 

The reality around them thumped again, as if the air itself was taking a deep breath.

At first, Blue thought it must be a trick of her eyes — but if it was, it was a trick of three pairs of eyes. So it must be real, lines running on the damaged pavement of Hong Kong as if someone had captured a group of firelights flying at impossible speed through the night. The track shivered and morphed, barely there in some points, white-hot in the spots where the enemy Jaeger was moving right now.

“What the fuck is this, your magic tricks are failing fuckers!” Kavinsky spattered through the comm. 

But given that they had muted the outgoing channel, Adam’s reply was not for him to hear. “Prediction system of the Fox core, I was taught how to take some liberties,” he smiled a bit tentatively, glancing at Blue enough that she knew — just like that — that Persephone must have gone to him too, somehow. “It’ll show you the best of the probabilities of the next steps, we can kind of…”

He trailed off, but Ronan was right after to complete. “Squash him. We will fucking _squash him_.”

Gansey half-groaned, as if the mentions of squashes from Ronan was enough to deserve an eyeroll regardless of the situation. 

But then they moved, and it was challenging enough to focus all of their attention. Ronan and Adam seemed smooth in it, but it probably did not count if Ronan could take command of their smooth warping and Adam was the one divining the routes for them all. Raven King did not have anything like that, but it had three brains to correct the chaos of ever-changing streaks of light. 

At the beginning, there were too many options, changing at every flash of attempted warping. But following the brightest line avoided them the worst hits, brought them surprisingly in trajectory to interject each of the enemy’s warpings. So hit after hit after movement, orbiting around the disjointed Jaeger that had kept them under check for way too long, the possible outcomes started to narrow. 

Eventually, the Jaeger reappeared directly in collision with Raven King’s shielding. The impact was loud and brutal, and though the comparable sizes made the effect less destructive than it had been on the mecha-wasps, the Jaeger still bumped back. _Back_ was exactly where Greywaren was coming from, an effortless use of Dreamcatcher summoning the two spears they had warped in before off the concrete and into their hands — and from their hands the weapons slashed right through both of the Jaeger’s too long and too disjointed arms, unavoidable. 

After all the clamor, the Jaeger was stalled between Raven King and Greywaren, and the prediction lines around them twirled in a circle precise like a target. 

No more options.

Gansey reopened the comm for one last message: “Disengage and exit the Jaeger or we will make you.”

A thick second of silence followed, interspersed only by the sounds of Jaeger’s shieldings grating against each other and some horrific retching from Whelk. 

“I don’t fucking think so,” Kavinsky said, low and glacially calm for someone so cornered. “Stop dying, Whelk, make yourself useful.”

The refusal was not surprising in any degree — none them had expected compliance from someone with arguments like Kavinsky’s — and yet there was _something_ in particular in the tone that filled Blue with dread.

They were already charging their weapons to deliver a synchronised final blow with all their firepower, regardless, but under their combined grip something underneath the enemy Jaeger’s shielding _throbbed_.

“NO!” Adam’s voice was an uncharacteristic scream through the comms. “Dont! Stop! You have to STOP!”

Greywaren unleashed the best of its firepower in an aggressive frenzy that did not make any difference. Neither did Raven King following suit even without understanding the urgency, because the enemy was not even fighting back, and the vibration under their grip only increased in intensity.

“I will never,” Kavinsky spelled out in a malicious drawl, “ _fucking stop_.”

In the enemy’s hutch, Whelk’s piloting position fell to pieces. 

There was none of the elegance, the raw power, that Greywaren had reserved to Adam’s post. It was an unravelling, thick with dark steam and gripping viscous liquid. 

Whelk did not fight it, or Kavinsky, or himself. 

The Jaeger swallowed him whole, and a high-pitched screech filled the air.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The last time Adam had failed so miserably he had still been in Virginia, too late at night for decency, and the aggressive neon lights of the porch had pierced through his eyes. He had felt himself falling under his father’s hits, and the first smash of his head had been hard enough to rebound. Time had slowed, then, for the principle of a concussion or maybe something else. _The next hit_ , something analytical had suggested to him, _will be a tragedy._

It had very much been, and any other devastation that had wreaked through Adam’s life always led back to that moment.

This, instead, was surprisingly new.

Same shit, new packaging, unfathomable scale.

This battle had shaken them like a bad omen, but the power of the activated cores — interfaced through the Cabeswater system, repaired in their path in a way that felt barely real — still coursed through Adam, full of _possibilities_.

And yet, as Kavinsky sacrificed a corrupted Whelk to a drifting core that had already been unbalanced, the analytical suggestion was back.

 _You let this happen_ , it said to Adam, _and it will be the end of the ends._

There was some cruelty in the clarity of his mind, the way in which everything seemed more interconnected as if following the subtle energy trails of the Prediction system.

With his throat still raw from screaming, Adam sagged against the vines that surrounded him and looked over Ronan.

“It won’t hold. It will flare, but it won’t hold,” he told him, and not even the certainty of reciprocal understanding brought by the drift was of much consolation in this case.

Still, it was Ronan who screamed next, through the comms. “Are you out of your _fucking_ mind, STOP! He’s dying, you’re dying! Disengage now, or you’re gonna raze everything to the ground!”

“God,” Kavinsky said, with a cruel laughter, “that would be _awesome_.”

Adam’s ears rang empty with the sound of it, worse than how he could remember them doing right after his father had laid waste on him.

 _The end of the ends._

“Any chance you can warp him all the way off?” Gansey was asking, furiously brainstorming with Ronan even as Adam stayed stubbornly silent. 

“I fucking wish, but it’s a whole Jaeger with an active core in collapse, it’s a bomb but not _that_ bomb,” Ronan replied, and the _that_ held all the connotations coming from Doomsday.

He could feel Ronan thinking, and fighting, and lending whatever was left of his brain for Adam to lean against in his own mental dissection. It struck Adam as the only overwhelmingly real difference in the terrifying way this whole situation was spiralling out of control.

Failing had always been a lonely pursuit. But Ronan would be with him, no matter what.

Chasing the trail of the thought, Ronan turned towards him, full of the kind of trust not even seeing Adam emerging from a xeno-engineered core seemed to shake. 

“Adam?”

On the frontal screen of Glendower, a writing flickered in light blue, right over the visual of the enemy Jaeger. It was outside of any protocol, bold and insistent.

_Don’t be scared._

This was exactly how Kavinsky had led them in this position, and then how they had led Kavinsky to be blocked between them. Narrowing choices, and no way out.

Adam swallowed. 

“We can’t warp him, but we can contain him...and annihilate him.” He said, at the end, willing desperately for his voice not to shake.

He knew everyone of the team was listening, but he was talking just to Ronan now, because Adam needed him to understand more than anyone else could even begin to imagine — about the situation, about a possible plan, and about Adam himself.

His mind opened for Ronan, and Ronan followed the path offered. In turn, Adam’s consciousness slid closer to his, in the hollow that always threatened the centre of it like a black hole.

“Gansey,” Ronan murmured, at the end, turning back towards the drift-harmonics comms — but not mentally away from Adam. “We’re gonna need to take over Raven King.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Richard Campbell Gansey III had never been a stranger to critical decisions, horrible in their overwhelming greatness. He had always preferred to have them unshed, which Helen would argue was an after-effect of their mother relying on everyone having the decency of getting a clue without forcing her to inelegantly spelling it out. 

Years ago, as everyone painted comforting pictures and inspiring sentences, a fifteen-year old Helen had told him: “We’re gonna train as soldiers and fight Mum’s war. I’ll be hard but I don’t think leaving the monsters win would be much better, and I’ll always be with you.”

Ten years and an avoided apocalypse later, and a lot of things had changed only to remain fundamentally the same. Colonel Gansey was a soldier, but he had a new team, and he was still fighting a war, but he decided to take charge of it so it wasn’t his mother’s war.

Letting the monsters win was still not a possibility.

So when Ronan Lynch — brother, second in command, and pillar of Gansey’s life — presented him with an unprecedented but straightforward request, there was no ignoring it.

“Take over Raven King how?”

“As in we’re gonna need your core energy too, to make sure that we’ll have more assets than this motherfucker will ever manage counter.”

A little game of pushing the enemy between a rock and a hard place, then.

It had not sounded pretty to begin with, but it was quickly getting worse, in the kind of way that required a more lengthy tactical appraisal. But the Jaeger they were tackling — piloted by a madman that had just “sacrificed” his copilot to a collapsing core — was increasingly shaking, and there was a worrying type of glow expanding through the lax fixtures of its shoulders, right next to Greywaren’s frontal visor. 

They were out of time, and a bomb ticked in the middle of one of the most populous cities in the whole continent. Hong Kong and metropolitan area, Gansey could list each and every one of the facts of what he thought of as _his city_ , but the distilled truth was one: the people had chosen Hong Kong as their home because in a world razed by monsters, the Pan Pacific Defence Corps would keep them _safe_.

The Corps had never failed humanity.

Until now.

_Tick tock tick tock._

“We’ll do it with you, you know it,” Blue argued, following the wave of reluctance that spread from Gansey through all of them. Taking over Raven King sounded way too close to abandoning the battle.

“You can’t,” Adam said, with a tense second of exasperation — not with them, but with anything that glowed faintly in the pupils of his eyes, in whatever was making sweat freeze on his forehead. “Everything is too out of line, they’re out of line, I didn’t want them to access the power of the three combined cores so I pushed them further out. So either we break this circle and Ronan and I come out on top or I don’t know how to fix this.”

It was viscerally intense. For all the times Gansey had wished to see Adam Parrish out of self-containment, he much preferred witnessing it when he and Ronan sparred, or kissed, than through this rough and battle-ready version.

And yet, if he drifted with Ronan so intensely, Gansey supposed it was the only option.

The clock ticked, faster and faster, and the light spread underneath the shielding plates of the enemy Jaeger. Kavinsky was not even fighting their deadlock anymore, maybe just because he could _not do that_. But neither he was letting them go, with blackness spreading along his face, perspiring out of his pores. 

“How do we do it?” Gansey asked, lacking another sensible option to deal with an excessively convoluted problem that promised to detonate a whole region if left unattended.

“Keep him from noticing until the last minute, let’s kick his ass in the meantime,” Ronan began, which was easy enough and blatantly not the point. “There is...there’s nothing that can make a core absorb another, but I can make something that will do it. And once I do, I’ll need you connected to the drift, Raven King active...until we latch to your core and...take over.”

The details were slippery, but they always were with something that evidently involved a heavy use of Dreamcatcher, and this time the territory was uncharted. The substance of it was raw, though, almost bristling on Gansey’s brain though Ronan was not trying to hurt him.

There was a flare from underneath the enemy shielding and a platelet detached with the strength of an airborne missile, a loud _bang_ trailing with impossible light-blue fire. 

The impact resounded through the inner city, among the wasteland around them and the safe building away from the epicentre they created. The mirror-shield of Raven King had expanded on its own volition, but the rebound hit on the street had pierced the asphalt meters in. 

“You can’t avoid this,” Kavinsky promised them, through his one-way comms. “You can’t contain this.”

“Gansey!” Ronan’s urgency was pointing towards one thing and one thing only — that they had to.

“And after you take over?” Gansey found himself asking nonetheless, his mind annoyingly making him aware of all the spots left blank for him to _take a clue_.

“You take an emergency ejection, and report to HQ.” 

The protest arose from the three of them in one voice, because if there was one sacred rule was that you did not leave anyone behind and that battles had to be fought until the end.

“Either detach or we’ll kill you with the takeover!” Adam cut through, with another surprisingly loud statement.

“I didn’t leave you during Doomsday!” Gansey’s protest rang almost unfair— such a low blow, in such an impossible situation. But when Ronan replied again, he was determined. 

“Except you did. When we detonated the Rim you went up, and we resurfaced when we could.” 

“That’s different!”

“It’s _fucking not_ , and if we stop this fucker I want you to _hold the centre_ and not let this shit day pack up in an unsolvable, forgotten _shitshow_!”

More grating noises, another impact that made them all flinch in the stark reminder that this could _not_ be brainstormed, unlike every other step that had brought them here, fighting together. 

“We have a blackbox compiled,” Henry said, swallowing dry, as soon as the tumult had decreased. “We won’t forget anything and no one will, if we bring it back.”

Water and steam from a pierced pipe spilled around them and the echoes of sounds of destruction lodged deeply in Gansey’s chest. Surrounded by all of this, every snap and whistle and bang felt like the clicking of a puzzle snapping together. He went to look for Noah in the videocomm and only then noticed that he had disappeared. 

Would this story just go like this, if they did not comply? An indiscernible tragedy, ready to come back invigorated and full of collateral damage? 

They did not chat any further.

The first thundering unleashing of firepower on the Jaeger between them was welcomed with manic laughter by Kavinsky, only partially invalidated by the sickly wet cough accompanying it. “It won’t fix anything, you bunch of fuckers, Whelk is burning nice and warm and you’re gonna burn too!”

Gansey was not intimate with feelings of pure, distilled anger. That had always been the Ronan’s realm, who among them had been slower, and never fully successful, in adapting to protocols and requirements. But as they stood in breach of every protocol and in the face of something they could have never prepared for, anger was the only thing left to feel.

Kavinsky seemed to catch onto Gansey’s fury, but not on Greywaren’s relative inactivity in the attack. It was better to get taunted — over the waste that would be his city, the failure of each of their plans, the uselessness of their little quest against the big scary monsters — than having him notice the last trick desperately up their sleeve. 

Ronan and Adam’s silence weighed on him more than the external turmoil. There was something glowing under the surface of Greywaren, too, more deceptive than obnoxious and menacing, and yet Gansey’s eyes kept being drawn to a barely-there movement, as tendrils expanded out of nowhere along the length of Greywaren’s arms. The length of them kept getting closer and closer to Raven King itself. 

It was difficult not to worry about what was hiding under the subdued half-formed whispers that Adam and Ronan were exchanging, in and out of the silent communication of the drift. 

Part of leadership was also trust, but Gansey was desperately unsure of what he was trusting, right now.

And then there was no time left to wonder. 

Blue flames started to flare up from the surface of the enemy Jaeger, which grew hotter and hotter on contact.

“Gansey,” Ronan whispered, and they knew it was time. 

“If it’s like Doomsday, make sure you resurface,” Gansey told him, acknowledging part of what was left unsaid, all the blind spots of this plan.

“Of course,” Ronan just told him, level-headed like a drill in the training rooms.

There was no way to acknowledge anything else, even just the unsubstantiated reluctance of Ronan’s reply.

This time, they got no count to three as a warning for them might be a warning too much.

It was just Ronan, looking at them one second too long, and then a brutal hit crashing through two of the most damaged spots of Raven King’s shielding. The mecha-wasps had already eroded it, but the vines that Greywaren had evoked pierced through almost surgically.

Alarms flared all over the hutch, warning for a critical invasion that they were not going to try and stop. 

Over the alarms, they all screamed. 

From the top of one of Raven King’s legs and one of its sides, the vines crushed everything in a path quick like an oil spill on water, and from every neural connection they touched they seemed to expand like a tree — from two to four, from four to sixteen, branching deeper and deeper towards the central core of Raven King.

The contamination during Doomsday was the closest thing to this moment Gansey had ever experienced — somewhat better, because it had been purely physical; somewhat worse, because he was trying to give in to it rather than fighting it. 

Blue wheezed among her yells and Henry cried distortedly. 

Trying to contain the Jaeger from any knee-jerk reaction that urged them to attack, to fight back, to destroy whatever was trying to destroy them from the inside out was an alienating effort. Time stretched and expanded in agony, but in reality it was terrifyingly quick. 

One second, five, eight. Twelve. Kavinsky noticed that something was wrong. Seventeen. 

Gansey’s eyes were crossing and the report screen was out of focus. He did not need it, to figure out when the contamination spread far enough to touch the core. It was like someone grappling his whole chest, a cruel hand shattering his ribs apart and grabbing onto his lungs and heart to _pull_.

Death felt within reach, in a sickening but alluring escalation. 

“Now!” 

Words were flattened of their meaning, as Gansey felt Blue and Henry’s pain as clearly as he had always felt their strength. If they were to let go, they should all let go together, because everything was more tolerable then losing them one by one — everything, even this.

“Gansey, _now_!”

With Greywaren clawing at Raven King’s core, Ronan’s demand echoed through the drift itself, ringing through their brain in a split second of clarity. 

It was enough. Enough for Henry to trigger the ejection, enough for Blue to clutch at the blackbox key that they created, enough for Gansey to disengage them from the contaminated drift. 

The piloting posts shut off abruptly, enclosing on themselves with a little whistle of air-tight fixtures. All around them, the chamber of Raven King was still lit up, and a writing flashed aggressively on the screen, lamenting _critical core contamination_. Being able to witness it, suddenly free of pain, made Gansey feel as if he just passed out and was looking at his body in dissociation.

And then the capsules that had closed around them propelled upwards, ejecting at impossible speed away from the piloting chamber.

In the whistling of acceleration, Gansey could not help but wonder what else, in addition to Raven King, he had just abandoned.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Ronan Lynch often thought guilt was encoded in his genes. He was quick to acquire it, and its grip was impossibly slow in lessening, no matter how much anger he dutifully applied to it. Niall Lynch used to say it was the Catholic blood running strong, but also used to remind Ronan that a saviour could do no wrong. With Niall’s death, Ronan was less certain that he would always be granted full indulgence, but his willingness to keep the world standing did not waver. 

Or maybe it did, it was, because Gansey was screaming as if Ronan was _killing him_ — which was not that far from the truth — and it was hard to remember why exactly was he doing this.

This agony was singlehandedly his creation. Or Adam’s concept, Ronan’s creation, but they were together in the drift so there was no distinction.

“I think I know what we need,” Adam had said — or thought, it was difficult to discern. “But it doesn’t exist yet and I don’t know how to make it exist.”

“I’ll make it exist alright,” Ronan had countered, with more certainty than he should reasonably feel.

Dreamcatcher shone brighter than it had ever had, better than the middle of the war, better than it had been with Niall. In the broken stream of Kavinsky’s threats and promises and mockeries, Ronan had thought, _you have nothing to teach me_. He had stretched his mind wide and reckless, and harvested from the drift.

It had been Ronan, his spinning thoughts, Adam’s design like an anchor in the energy flood. It felt like spreading your hand wide inside running river water and grasping from the current. Beautiful and horrifying, as from just a creation they had turned it into a weapon — inflicting it upon their allies, their friends, their _family_.

There was something terrible about how Ronan knew everything was working because Greywaren sang to him about power, enough to make his teeth clatter. Gansey was screaming, and Ronan had Raven King at his fingertips. The whole _world_ was at his fingertips.

“Now!” Ronan screamed, because he did not know what would happen if he were to indulge this further. Henry, Gansey and Blue did not even seem to be able to listen to him. His desperation charged through more than just comms, because this drift was _his_ now. “Gansey, _now_!”

As the enemy Jaeger got closer to flare into pieces between them, Ronan was afraid for one second too long that the trio would not listen to him. They would not listen, and maybe he and Adam would not be able to stop because Greywaren had started a merging that could not be reversed — not once it had gotten a taste of _more_. But then the capsules snapped closed around them, and Raven King ejected them like missiles, breaking the holiness of the piloting chambers. 

Ronan and Adam remained alone. Just the two of them, Greywaren, and a dying deranged man ready to detonate their existence.

“What is thissss,” the demand came in a hissing through the comms, shaking with the same vibration that of the Jaeger. “What are you doinggg.”

Kavinsky did not even sound human anymore, blackness pooling his eyes and running off like tears.

_What does he sound like?_

It was more of a suggestion than a question, echoing what Opal had asked earlier to Adam in the core. For Ronan, whose existence felt increasingly raw every moment that passed, it was not really a question — Kavinsky had started this as a human, he kept this on as a human, so maybe it was human to be willing to finish without unconditional surrender, for someone who just wanted to see the world burn if he could not own it.

“We’re gonna take you down,” Ronan growled back.

That was as much precision as they had in this plan, and they did not speak of the half-answers and full omissions they had given to Gansey. Now it was just Ronan and Adam and the apocalypse 2.0 on a dubious scale. 

The enemy Jaeger twisted around in the deadlock between Greywaren and the now-empty Raven King. The movements snapped off pieces of shielding, as if even the spinal column of the Jaeger was dislodging now, and yet it stayed upright and now facing them.

The next flare came on a full sphere, not only impacting Greywaren directly but also projecting back, underneath, all around, threatening destruction on the already-damaged city. It was not difficult to imagine that destruction would be the only certainty if the full power of this collapsing core was unleashed.

But Ronan and Adam had more power too, now. 

Their minds raced off before they could even planning, and a bubble expanded around them — just like Raven King’s mirroring shield, but _more_. It absorbed every hit and then collapsed it back on its source, crashing on the enemy Jaeger.

With shielding cracking, breaking, flying off, the mechanical weapon was becoming unrecognisable, more than it had ever been in its makeshift Frankenstein composition. It was more like a fluid humanoid shape, and the characteristic blue hue of the drifting core spiralled towards something darker — blue, purple, purple black. 

Only the frontal plaque remained unchanged, molten and flat, but its uneven casting seemed to animate as well.

Suddenly, they were deadlocked back, with this ravenous horror thrashing and squirming between the two Jaegers to climb onto Greywaren.

Right in their face, the frontal plaque morphed into something more, a dark mask with a toothless mouth that twisted and opened. And opened. And opened.

The air filled with what could only be defined as a Kaiju screech.

  
  


* * *

  
  


No amount of shock absorbers and self-directed propellers for landing could have prevented Henry’s ears from ringing when the capsule hit the ground.

He laid there for longer than he could ascertain, the throbbing of his ankle the only life-line connecting his mind to his body for a bit. Then came the ground swinging, a stark sense of disorientation, and if it hurt to breathe it was not for any real damage. It might be all in his brain, snatched away from the agony of their cannibalised drift. 

The pod opened with a whistle of released vacuumised layers, and Blue waited for him on the other side, holding on heavily against the edge of the cylinder.

“I’m okay,” Henry wheezed, reaching to touch her hand and accepting being dragged up as well a second later. “Are you okay, have you got it?”

“It hurts,” Blue commented, still grappling on the pod. It did not require any other explanation, because they had been in the same drift — and now they were disconcertingly out of it, and she felt too separated from him to make _sense_. “But I’ve got it, we’ve got it.”

She made a small movement with her head and Henry noticed the small storage key tucked into the neck of the suit, as safe as possible on a ground that kept shaking, with an air full of the crackling and snapping the enemy Jaeger had been collapsing with.

“Where is Gansey?”

“Here, come on, can you walk?” 

Getting out of a pod in full mental and physical fatigue with a shattered ankle really wore Henry’s training thin, but they managed — they had to manage, because Gansey could not be left there, standing alone and staring at the battle in the distance.

They were not even that far away. It was enough for the ground to be unshattered by the fighting, for the air to be colder than what was left after the scorching flares, but Jaegers were tall as buildings and there was no mistaking them.

Henry must not have not been out for long, because the stalemate had not broken yet. 

Nevertheless, the sight was disconcerting on multiple levels, even more so seen from the outside. 

Raven King was stiff like a misplaced doll striking a pose, still grappling at the enemy Jaeger even while the light drained off from underneath its shieldings. Wave after wave, it was like seeing the life getting sucked out of it in waves, and every wave always led to the vines Greywaren had pierced them through.

In contrast, Greywaren shone brighter than it ever had, as if its own shielding could barely contain the strength that hid underneath. The air itself around them shivered in waves, too hot, too thick. 

Between them, the enemy Jaeger appeared as much as a makeshift weapon as it had ever been and at the same time it was like watching an animated H-bomb squirming. 

The effect wouldn’t be much different, if the brutal flare that followed was anything to go by.

“Gansey, stay down!” They both scrambled to drag him back at the edge of the pod, but before they could do it a bubble expanded, soft like a whistle, and then crashed, glowing blue with the light of the drift.

Henry’s breath caught, but he was not the only one, as they held close to each other and turned their heads around to avoid staring directly into the explosion. Under the grip of Henry’s hands, Gansey was trembling.

Before they could do anything, or say anything, the screeching of tires braking to a stop behind them caught them in a flight-of-fight kind of surprise. 

Gansey and Blue plastered in front of Henry with a fierce aggressiveness that had everything to do with Henry being hurt, and the alert did not soften in seeing a military grade motorcycle with two heavily-armed people on top.

“What the _hell_ is happening?” the one riding at the back asked them, and the helmet’s face shield lifted to show Helen’s face. She dismounted and right behind her there was someone who could only be Declan, given his built and the way he moved.

They took half a breath, but not even in full. The clamouring from the battlefield escalated and they just _had_ to turn. 

Henry had been quite sure, at the beginning, that they had been dealing with a Jaeger. Now, it looked like a very different type of monster, morphing and climbing on Greywaren. 

Gansey had heard enough Kaiju screams to suffice for the three of them, and it did not matter how much Henry’s lungs were still hurting from the grappling of Greywaren’s vines. 

When the enemy screamed, dark and ominous and shining, everything inside his body shuddered.

“Oh my god…” Blue whispered.

Henry held her hand tight, with the other on Gansey’s shoulder, but it did not offer much reassurance in the moment it became evident that the enemy Jaeger — or what had become of it — was pulsing like an overcharged bomb. Its hands grasped at Greywaren but they looked like they were melting on the shielding, spreading like a cancerous contamination. As it did, the pulsing assumed the vibration that Greywaren itself had sported. 

There were other blasts, and the bubble that expanded and contracted around Greywaren still contained them, but the two Jaegers were now so entangled that the rebounds hit the two of them together.

Shining with the light of two cores, still grappling at Raven King, Greywaren was bright as a flash snow in the middle of the day. Seeing it like this was a terrible contrast, as if someone had spilled oil and the contamination was spreading in slow tendrils.

“Fuck…” Henry’s throat moved hard but his mouth was dry as hell. 

This was going to end in fire, and the enemy would not burn alone.

Declan ripped the helmet off his head, marching up to the three of them. “Where is my brother?” he demanded, between clenched teeth. “Gansey, _where is my brother_?!”

Gansey looked at Henry, white like chalk and with wide eyes that made him look like a young, lost king who was about to lose a capital battle.

“ _Where is he?!_ ”

They all knew where Ronan was. 

He was where he had always been: in the first line of fire for an impossible war, in Greywaren. 

Ronan was with Adam, and they were going to be the last stand, whatever it might take.

  
  


* * *

  
  


_Critical contamination damage. Shell compromised: 20%_

Another blast, another rebound. Bracing for it did not lessen the shattering sensation that spread all along Adam’s body, focusing at his temples, but it was the best they could do.

And their best was failing.

“It’s escalating...and it’s eating us back.”

No matter how loud the warzone around them was, Ronan’s voice could always stay a whisper between them, soothing in Adam’s mind. But even the comfort of his presence was starting to become daunting, so Adam thought, _maybe_.

“The containment field will fail, once we all collapse,” Adam agreed. “We have to make it fail away from the centre of the city.”

“Little bit creative?” Ronan proposed, and the side of his lips tilted up sideways, a bit bitter, a bit subdued.

Adam would never understand what it was about tragic moments that made everything so overwhelmingly _quiet_. Even the adrenaline was left simmering around the surface, as if on idle for the last strand of efforts, knowing full well that there would not be that many left to shoulder. 

They had done everything they could, everything _thinkable_ — merging two cores in one, hoping to quench the third knot of the Cabeswater network, hoping that Kavinsky would not be able to see this escalation until the very end. There were no more suggestions from anyone that had lead them up to here, Gansey, Blue and Henry were safe somewhere else.

Adam’s eyes were still ablaze with the mazes and twists of the Prediction system of the drift. He could see it, taste it, touch it, as it converged.

 _Just the city left to save_ , a detached part of his mind whispered, _and then you’re done._

Even Opal had told him she was ready to go.

The crack of it all ran deep along Adam’s sternum.

“You could go,” Adam said, turning towards Ronan almost on a whim. “I can handle the rest, like you handled it. You could go.”

“Fuck off,” Ronan murmured, so sweetly Adam’s throat tingled with tears — he hated, and loved, that Ronan would feel it too. “Let’s wrap this up.”

_Critical contamination damage. Shell compromised: 37%_

“ _You’re all gonna die._ ” By now, Kavinsky’s voice sounded like a growl, like a call from the abyss, and Adam could not help but wonder if any pilot was human enough to have the small grace of a clear death. Kavinsky did not seem like a good example, if the deteriorated path he had slippered down to was anything to go by. “ _You played with the world like you own it, but now I’ll end it for you._ ”

“You’re not gonna end shit,” Ronan snarled, violently back in focus towards the only plan left. 

Ronan gave one sharp pull to the left handle, just as Adam gave one to the right, and he began to _dream_.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Since the very first minute she had seen a Kaiju up close, a part of Blue had said that she had had enough. It was the sensible part, the part that resonated nicely with the common sense of the common people. But no matter how much she comforted herself with being cleverly rooted to the ground, there was another part of her that always longed for the stars. Having seen the centre of her family, in the form of Maura, Calla and Persephone, piloting a Mark-III Jaeger in pursuit of a Kaiju, she had somewhat thought that was the pinnacle of her wonder and eagerness. 

Now, trapped as she was on the brink of a storm that promised to wreck them all irreparably, a stray thought in her mind whispered to her that she would struggle to find anything more overwhelming than Greywaren, to witness. Niall Lynch had probably called this Jaeger’s special handling feature “Dreamcatcher” with something like this in mind.

As they watched — because there was no way they would not watch, after having forfeited the way to _act_ — Greywaren raised one arm, and then the other, clawing down on the partially disembodied Jaeger that plastered on them. 

The contact alone made contamination spread from the Jaeger’s hands upwards, little tendrils of black mirroring precisely what was already finding its path along the chestplate and the legs. 

“They will never rip that off, look at it…” Helen said, holding onto the helmet all too violently with her non-prosthetic hand. 

“That’s not it,” Gansey barely exhaled, hypnotised on the proceeding like a moth drawn to the flame that will burn it down. “They’re tackling it, so it won’t escape.”

Understanding where Gansey took his Ronan-related discernment was impossible, but he had never, ever, been wrong. He was not this time, either, it only took the rest of them a couple of seconds to catch up.

And in those couple of seconds, the shielding platelets at Greywaren’s back began to unshed in the center, flipping open to the sides. The light that shone from underneath hurt Blue’s eyes to watch, and at the same time she could not avert her gaze.

 _That’s Greywaren with Raven King_ , she knew, with a visceral certainty, _that's both of us._

Only Greywaren was alone in this glory, and alone in this horror.

There was something emerging from pure drift energy, materialising and growing from between the Jaeger’s shoulder blades. No matter how it tried, the contamination did not catch that point, and the rising continued, like additional limbs stretching and sharpening. And then the air itself sounded cut, by thunder or by blades alike, as dark laminates started to crowd around behind Greywaren, drawn magnetically to its back. 

Maybe they were evoking them, maybe they were creating them.

One slotted itself against the glowing extensions, followed by ten more, twenty more, until every piece of laminate was raining against Greywaren. And Greywaren was assimilating them, like a bird of prey growing two dark wings out of nowhere. 

When they spread them, abruptly, it was with a single metallic sound, as imposing as the net result.

For a second, Blue forgot to be afraid of what might be just about to happen. The sight of Greywaren in a pair of impossibly wide dark wings, shimmering with the reverberating light of the drift, was the essence of a dream projected into reality.

They fluttered, with a metallic clangour. Then there was a full beat, and another, and another, loud like a thunderstorm in the air. 

Uncaring of any weight constraints, with Raven King and the enemy Jaeger in tow, Greywaren _took flight_.

  
  


* * *

  
  


A lightheaded euphoria bubbled inside Ronan, pressing against the tip of his tongue, the back of his teeth, over and over again, until he gave up and laughed in the face of something equally perfect and unknown. 

All around them, there was chaos, but here inside the hutch for some long seconds there was only Ronan and Adam, and Adam and Ronan, and Greywaren and the drift. And there was no need for anything else, just Adam’s brilliant, brilliant mind tracing a carbon copy in bright chalk for Ronan to follow, and fill, and enrich with anything he could imagine, anything the drift was happy to provide him. 

Then they were done, and the battle still existed, and under Greywaren’s grip the enemy Jaeger was burning hot enough to melt the shielding.

_Critical contamination damage. Shell compromised: 59%_

It hurt, Ronan realised belatedly. But in the fog that followed such a boundless use of Dreamcatcher, Ronan’s body might as well not be his own. 

Sweat collected at his temples and he breathed hard, turning towards Adam. He was swaying among the vines, but smiled at Ronan in a private, intimate way that Ronan knew had never — would never — belong to anyone else.

They spread their wings, wide and strong and ready and the thrill of it made the very essence of the drift thrum.

“ _What’s this fuckery?_ ” Kavinsky growled, as his Jaeger continued to sound more beast than machine. “ _Has anyone ever told you that Jaegers don’t fly?_ ”

This mockery in particular made Ronan’s teeth grind against each other hard. “Your _mother_ doesn’t fly, ‘cause she’s a motherfucking _pig_.”

Adam’s subtle snort, a little mean and wholeheartedly appreciative of Ronan even in his maddening situation, was enough to make Ronan’s chest ache, reminding him that he did have a heart and it was still beating, against all odds.

One beat, another. One flap, another. 

They lifted off the ground, and then up, and then up, because the mass of three Jaegers was no concern for the wings the drift had manifested exactly for this purpose, for this one-time-only feat.

This was everything they needed: to fly high enough that a significant part of Hong Kong would not be destroyed even by containing an explosion.

The inside of Ronan’s ribcage fluttered like their wigs, and he felt Adam’s slow, almost peaceful inhale right through his sternum.

There was only one thing left to do.

He looked at Adam, helpless in so many accounts.

“I wanted an entire life with you,” Ronan whispered, so private but still out loud, because certain sentiments needed to be felt on the sharp line of words. 

Adam looked back, with the brightest eyes and a heart that loved fiercely and steadily.

“We’ve got this one.”

And this one had been too little, too quick, and yet by the intensity of Adam’s attachment that filled the drift, it might as well have been forever. 

Ronan’s throat jumped, and even if it made Adam’s eyes glitter desperately, he said, “Thank you, for that.”

Everything else, they had yet to invent words for, so Ronan did not try and speak of it. The drift lit up with it, with his devotion and Adam’s passion, and all the little rough matching edges that made the unknownable _known_.

Together, they grappled at that feeling and at each other. It was like holding hands, Ronan’s fingers tingling as if entertwined with Adam’s, a point of unrelinquishing contact where he could press, and press, and never let go.

There was only one thing left to be done.

“Pilot override,” Ronan declared.

The system — _Opal_ was so present with them that Ronan’s authorisation cleared with the name _Kerah_.

The rest did not need to be spoken, to be executed.

_Self-destruct sequence activated. 1 minute to self-destruction._

  
  


* * *

  
  


After Doomsday, Gansey had spent some weeks riddled by hallucinations. They would take him over in odd times of the day, or the night, merging the hours until they were indistinguishable. It had been just in his mind, and yet it had seemed impossible that one lonely brain could produce something so monumental, as he had dreamt of light, and dark, and of a morphed world that quivered at the corners.

So why could this not be a lucid dream — a waking nightmare — as well?

His head swayed just the same, his veins crystallised into shivers just the same. 

Greywaren was lifting into the air, its swing sweeping dust and ashes out of the battle ruins in a slow vortex that accompanied them upwards. It was almost peaceful to witness, as Gansey’s whole self rang empty like a sound box with nothing to resonate with. His gaze was all he was, following Greywaren above the roofs of the skyscrapers, strikingly dark against a dull, flat sky greyed by smoke and explosions. 

Tampered by contamination, entire plaques of shielding began to precipitate off the Jaeger. But as much as the enemy was pitch black, like a reflux collecting too much pollution, Greywaren flashed of the brightest blue, a speeding pace of vibration that travelled like the chiming of a bell in the wind. 

Nothing of this was about weapons.

Perhaps Ronan and Adam had brought a god into these skies.

There was a rumble above, the echo of thunder coming impossibly before the trail of lightning, running flat and purplish. Greywaren held the core of this storm, and the crackle of static electricity accompanied the inexorable expansion of its forcefield. A bubble, first, and then an oval, flattening like a disk and glowing brighter with the light that trailed off Greywaren.

A last long, outraged screech from the corrupted Jaeger bumped distorted through the buildings, muffled to Gansey’s disengaged hearing.

One last trembling, and then the light spread all through the disk, beyond, lighting up the whole sky.

Someone was pulling at Gansey, but he refused to move, he refused to feel, he refused to do anything but look. But the light was too intense and Gansey blinked over his crossed eyes.

One blink was quick enough.

All the light, all the energy, collapsed on itself like a supernova.

And just like the death of a star, everything exploded.

“Down!” a distant, desperate voice filtered in his brain, and Gansey only caved to kneel because there were two pairs of arms and the weight of two people dragging him, pressing him precariously against the evacuation pod. 

It would have never been enough, in a normal deflagration. And yet it was enough in this, with an impossible pressure flattening them all against the ground, bone-crunching in its momentum. Gansey looked beyond Henry’s shoulders — because he had to, he _had to_ — and the sky was burning, flaring, howling, but all in the flat disk that Greywaren had enforced.

When the disk broke, the explosion was already propagating unevenly: not the sphere of damage that would have annihilated the whole town and more, but a firestorm. Nothing but bright blue flames steadily devolving into a mundane red, and then a shower of debris falling down from the sky. 

Someone was screaming.

Gansey’s mind was so far away, but the scream was loud enough to howl in his own head.

Loud and desperate, sucking him back up inside his body.

Someone was screaming, _he_ was screaming, and the sound only exacerbated the shattering of his chest, so he screamed more.

Abruptly, the reality was there, and gritty, and burnt. Henry and Blue were clammy with sweat and holding Gansey tight, even as he thrashed around, his heart broken.

There was a bang at the side of the pod and Gansey only turned around because Henry and Blue were turning around, as if recoiling. He could not hear, he was not sure he could properly see, but Declan loomed above them screaming something unintelligible, and even his attempt on violence came across as scattered, aghast. Beyond Declan’s shoulders, Helen was pulling him back in an uncharacteristically messy way, shaking with tears.

Gansey’s head was empty of anything but loss.

Whatever Delcan had wanted to do, wherever he had wanted this to lead, they all stopped and startled at the impacts that started to surround them, loud as a bombing. Gansey let himself be hauled under a building, as scattered broken parts of Jaeger crashed out from the sky, breaking windows and asphalt and everything in between. 

With ineffable cruelty, an impact came twenty meters away from them, crushing a van underneath. It was part of a mechanical hand, thumb and index finger and only half of the middle, the palm torn apart diagonally, full of frayed cable ends. It dripped blue liquid on the floor, faintly glowing in the motion but already opaque like quicksilver when it touched the street floor. 

Declan swayed on his feet, landing with one shoulder against the wall, and it took a second for Gansey to process the fact that he was crying — and Gansey had never seen Declan cry, not even for Niall. Maybe he just had not been looking at the right moment,

This was a moment that allowed for no hiding.

He would recognise Greywaren’s hand everywhere, and so would Declan.

The thought alone sufficient to break any breath that Gansey still had in his lungs, toeing the line between a panic attack and suffocation. He folded over himself, and choked on every other scream that refused to leave his body.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Hong Kong spun slowly beneath them, far enough to see the rooftops of the skyscrapers in full, but maybe not as far as they would have liked, to minimise the damages.

It had to be okay, it would have to suffice. 

There were roars from the outside, now perfectly echoed by the comms in the inside, as Kavinsky lost lucidity while his bastardised, sacrificed drift consumed him. Even without words they could both sense his outrage against this final unpreventivated strategy that had torn apart Kavinsky’s schemes.

“Quit whining, you chose this,” Ronan snarled, remorseful but focused, and he snapped off all comms.

They did not need them anymore.

_Self-destruct sequence activated. 43 second to self-destruction._

Adam closed his eyes, grateful for the humming white noise of the hutch. He made a conscious effort of releasing his jaw from its clench, to exhale and give in into the vines that still held him connected. There was a sense of vertigo coiling at the mouth of his stomach, queasy in the awareness of how many hundreds of meters separated them from the ground.

“I used to be afraid of heights,” Adam confessed, on a whim that came with a scattered flow of memory — the trailer park being way too grounded close to the earth, looking down the school’s window at the third floor just to feel this same sensation, the unreachable incongruent yearning for the fun fair he could have never participated in regardless. 

“You,” Ronan remarked, with a coarse laughter of disbelief. “Are you afraid now?”

“No,” Adam opened his eyes again, and turned to look at Ronan. 

At the corner of his vision, Persephone was walking around the hutch in a sort of contemplation, and Noah was back at the sitting spot under Adam’s platform as if he had never left it. Adam smiled a bit, between tension and sorrow and the weird joy of not being alone. 

_Self-destruct sequence activated. 38 second to self-destruction._

“I think I’ll try to see how far I can stretch this,” Adam said, dangling the vine connectors around. The countdown ran against his retina whether he wanted it or not, making his heart thump. “To touch you one last time.”

He desperately willed his voice not to crack and failed. Ronan swallowed hard. “I would love that.”

“Then drop the handles and move,” a voice said, on the far left side of Ronan’s platform. “We’re running out of time.”

“You’re the one who’s late,” Persephone pointed out, climbing effortlessly among the twist of vines and shouldering Adam gently away. “Off you go.”

Adam stumbled, half-frozen, and yet nothing in comparison to the crestfallen look on Ronan’s face when Niall Lynch stepped up the platform at eye level with him. 

He was about as real as Noah and Persephone, which was to say perfectly and ephemerally so. Adam had never seen him up close when he was alive, but the similarity with Ronan’s well-loved features was starking, if slightly invalidated by the blue hue of the drift that filtered under Niall’s skin now. And through the drift itself, Ronan’s guilt and pain and grief hit Adam like a slap, as if not even a second had passed and Niall was still getting killed. 

Niall Lynch had been narcissistic, ruthless, morally grey at best, and they had questioned his actions over and over again in the last few weeks. But now he was there, at the end of all things, and it was not for more answers, nor for more questions. Filial love was a challenging concept to grasp, and yet Adam understood it perfectly through Ronan, eyes watering reflexively. 

_Self-destruct sequence activated. 27 second to self-destruction._

“Let go,” Niall insisted, stern and precise, only to smile a little at Ronan’s broken sob. “This was a very fucking good job. And it’s enough...let go.”

Ronan more or less fell off the platform, stumbling as if disoriented, and Adam could do nothing but rushing for him, leaving the space to Persephone on one side, and Niall to the other, to take the commands. The drift shivered, and Adam felt it in the inside of his eyelids, under his nails — it would not be stable long, but Greywaren would not live to see the next minute so maybe it did not quite matter. 

Ronan clawed at Adam, plastering him against his side even while he kept staring at Niall, breathing heavy. 

Both their breaths caught at the contact, sparking and soaring and crackling.

They were still on the drift, so incredibly strong to be transcendent of connectors and piloting platforms, just as it had been when Adam had walked the core. 

“And to think I always told you I would never pilot with you,” Persephone was saying, behind Adam, laughing distractly at Niall.

“Well, I know you wouldn’t miss rubbing off a nice victory for _anything_ ,” Niall smirked, and reactivated the comms. “Hello, motherfucker, how about _we_ bury _you_?”

In the roar that followed, it was Noah that rushed to press them both with their backs against one of the thickest vines, one that spanned the hutch from floor to ceiling. Half a contact sparked like a release of static electricity along both of their skins, but Noah shoved them harder, with more purpose. 

_Self-destruct sequence activated. 16 second to self-destruction._

“This was very brave, now go,” Persephone told them.

“See what you can do about that life,” Niall said, but looked mainly at Ronan, making his chest jump under Adam’s hand. 

Adam dropped a cheek on Ronan’s shoulder, overwhelmed to the point of an anticlimactic terror now that he was out of his post and ushered into something unplanned. For all his turmoil, Ronan wrapped an arm around him with a delicious type of pressure.

Off on the screen, well off the incoherent comms coming from the barely discernible hutch of the enemy, there was a little writing, once again: _Bye, Kerah and Adam._

“Goodbye,” Noah echoed. “This was nice.”

Adam noticed only now that Noah seemed to be melting, for lack of a better term, from the feet up. Or maybe he was just merging, as the vine behind them pulsed and grew, going to absorb envelop Ronan and Adam. Noah looked more hollow, now, and more glowing at the same time, as he unravelled in the drift. 

“It’s okay, I was mostly gone before you came around,” Noah said, catching on unexpressed regret. He smiled on one side only, as the other sunk deeper and deeper, dismorphing his face. It should have been horrifying but it was only very sad. “Goodbye,” he said again, echoing a bit, and it looked like they were all hugging for a second, before the vines wrapped around Adam and Ronan completely. “Goodbye, don’t throw it away.”

And then it was just Adam and Ronan, all too tight against each other as a terrible pressure grew around them.

They fell, or flew, and everything went black.

Black and then white and then exploding in colours, like a supernova burning everything to stardust.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The quiet after the storm was more arduous to shoulder than the storm itself, sometimes. 

It certainly was for Gansey, who was caged in his own brain with not even the sound of debris raining down from the sky to give him a break. He was raw from the inside out, and his throat was shut by having screamed himself to silence. 

Screaming and crying and struggling against Henry and Blue’s hold had only served him for so long. When he was younger, untrained and prone to outbursts, his mother used to tell him that uncontrolled display of emotions were mostly capricious, spitting out thoughts instead of digesting them properly and let them come out elaborated. Preaching aside, there must be a level of truth in it, because as the dust danced around them, reluctant to settle, Gansey could not spit his heart out anymore and was just left to consider the fact that it had shattered.

Three Jaegers had just imploded in the Hong Kong skies. One was his, evacuated. The other was the enemy, annihilated. Then there was Greywaren, with Ronan and Adam who had made an art out of explosive damage control and might have saved all the lives in an entire metropolitan area and beyond in the process.

If the sky was now peaceful, they were gone also. It was as easy as that, and yet staring at that crushed scrap of Greywaren’s hand made him think of Ronan dismembered and carbonised in the same dust that fluttered in the air. He wanted nothing more than ripping his own flesh apart at the thought.

He got up, slowly disentangling from Blue and Henry — who had never left him, who had held him up without breaking apart as well even though Blue’s eyes were bloodshot and Henry seemed on the verge of throwing up. In the process, he also turned his back to Declan, who was unnaturally still with his forehead at the edge of Helen’s shoulders, looking more humanly broken than ever. 

“Where are you going?” Helen croaked out, with a low trembling still shaking her body.

Maybe it was better, if every single one of them was mourning. Maybe it was worse. Maybe Gansey just needed to see the end of his world up close.

“To give a look,” he barely managed to breathe out, voiceless. “You can stay, I’ll be back.”

Which was of course when everyone got up to follow, even Henry who had a shattered ankle that Gansey had been a terrible boyfriend in disregarding, even Declan who only sort of moved because Helen grasped at his nape with her prosthetic hand and nuded him forward.

It was better, it was worse.

Gansey kept Henry against his side even though he did not really want to feel anything this close, and walked steadily through the aftermath of the warzone even though the piloting suit was killing him just as much as everything else.

The sky was still flattened, whitish and claustrophobic as it hung too low over their heads. Walking closer to what had been the epicentre of their fight took ages on foot, and would have been a handful of strands on a Jaeger. In their path, they found several unrecognisable objects — certainly Jaeger-sourced, but blackened and half-melted in unrecognisable twists. Other, Gansey recognised perfectly, because they were pieces of Raven King and nothing could make them unknown.

In the general ache, the unquestionable knowledge that Gansey would never, _ever_ pilot again was almost an afterthought — which spoke plenty of how tragic the situation was. 

The closer they got to what had been the epicentre of their fight, the thicker the dust in the air was, in the middle of the destruction. Above, however, everything remained silent. There were three darker streaks of clouds marking the point where the Jaeger supernova had imploded. They looked innocent, just bending and diffusing against the whiteness, three curves intersecting on three points — like a circle but not quite.

“What is that?” Blue asked, breaking an excessively long silence and dragging Gansey’s eyes away from the sky.

Down in the gritty ground, there was a hole deeper than any other they had come across, focused and profound like a bullet wound, piercing through the asphalt and reaching the sand layer underneath. 

“Maybe something too heavy,” Henry said, hanging heavily on Gansey’s shoulder. But they had all stopped in its proximity, because the ashes danced hypnotically around that spot.

After some long seconds of silence, Gansey sneaked delicately out from the loop of Henry’s arms, making sure Blue was safely at his side before announcing, “I’m going down there.”

“Gansey, what the hell,” Blue whispered, running a hand over her face — still bloodied and getting more swollen. If there had been any way, and any mental strength, Gansey should have argued that she stayed away from the thick of the dust before starting this aimless wandering. 

“No, listen, it’s…” he trailed off, voice breaking over the effort to speak. He wished it were completely rational, but it was not. “It’s glowing. Everything else is dead opaque but…” 

It was not all glowing, in all honesty. It was just a trail, sliding from the edge of the concrete all the way down, like a single rivulet feeding a deep spring. 

“Okay then we’re coming too,” Blue raised his chin, with that tone that suggested _no compromise_.

“Jesus Christ…” Gansey gave in to the instinct of running a gloved hand on his face, even though the grating of the empty connectors only worsened the situation. “Jane, your eye is hurt, Henry’s ankle is hurt, Helen’s prosthetic has limited mobility…”

“Then I’m coming, move,” Declan rasped out, doubling up two seconds later when Gansey blinked at him too owlishly. “Let’s see _what fucking else_ is up, goddamnit, because…”

The sentenced trailed off, incomplete, but Gansey did not need it to be complete. Declan was going crazy, just like Gansey was going crazy, so they could go down like crazy and hope for twenty minutes of pragmatism in the face of helplessness.

Maybe more than twenty minutes, because climbing down without falling face-first was a delicate pursuit. But Gansey preferred to feel his blood pumping in exertion, and the steady rise in adrenaline in noticing the glowing trail expanding, rather than just ache with no escape in sight.

At the bottom, defying all expectations, there was a bundle of cables — or _vines_ — reminding Gansey of what Greywaren had used to pierce through Raven King. A little shiver ran down his spine. The glowing was slowly diffusing off here too, and maybe after all this would only be another pointless leftover of the disaster.

“We could go back up…” Gansey blurted out, unchecked.

“I didn’t make myself clear if you think I’ll accept any other shit hanging arou…” Declan’s sentence slipped off when, in the rush of turning towards Gansey, he made a rock slide all the way off and bumping against the bundle.

Just like that, the vines flared, one last time, and then half-shattered, half-frayed off like a silk cocoon unravelling. 

They both stilled, as if plastering against some sand-dried ground would do them any good in a dangerous close-contact situation at the bottom of a hole.

“Guys?” Helen’s voice called from above, but they did not reply.

And then there was a sharp inhale, paired by a different wheezing, and followed by two matching coughing fits, gloriously mundane in this impossible situation. 

Among the dried remaining of the bundle, Ronan and Adam were wrapped defensively around each other, full of heaving breaths as if they had just emerged from apnoea. 

“Oh my God…” Gansey choked on his words, on his own thoughts, and let go of his grip on the ground to let himself fall down, carelessly and heavy.

He landed messily around Adam and Ronan’s legs, with a low winching and a subdued “What the fuck…” from Ronan. But then both of them turned towards Gansey, slow and disoriented, and Gansey stared at them, damaged in a way that was reluctant to accept any promise.

“Gansey…” Ronan whispered, with the gall of being disbelieving in himself. 

Gansey gave a long, hysterical laughter, that croaked in his throat like the cawing of a raven, and he launched onto the both of them, all but tackling them.

“I thought you were dead...I thought there was no other way…” 

Inside his arms, Adam was particularly frozen, but Ronan shivered into motion after a second, grabbing at the spinal connectors of Gansey’s suit to drag him more firmly into contact.

“I thought so also...I really...I thought so also…”

Maybe Gansey was having another, fully unwarranted panic attack, because breathing was just as funny of a business as breathing. He only lift up when Declan landed messily as well, with a marked delay, looking at Ronan as if the colour would never return to his face.

“You’re a fucking asshole,” He whispered, after a second, but bodily dragged Ronan out of the loop of Gansey’s left arm to hug him hard and fast, face pressed desperately against the crown of Ronan’s head.

“I’m sorry,” Ronan whispered, which in itself alone was a sentence that should provoke the apocalypse again, coming from him. And instead this time around it was just Ronan, clawing back at Declan with clear turmoil. 

It was the most affectionate — _brotherly_ — that Gansey had ever saw them, and it made him tear up in his own right. He hugged onto Adam harder, which seemed to both perplex and overwhelm Adam in himself.

Both Ronan and Adam had something uncanny in them upon looking at them for to long. Their suits were severely damaged; Ronan’s in particular was ripped away from his shoulders and deep black lines were expanding on his fair skin, as if the ink was contaminating the drifting scars, and then some. When Gansey drew back to look at Adam, his eyes seemed too bright, almost shimmering, and his hands as he grasped back at Gansey were too warm. 

But they were alive, and shell-shocked, and there to tell the tale.

“Jane! Henry! Helen!” Gansey called, forcing on a voice that still refused to aid him after being abused. “They’re here! They’re _here_!”

“What?!”

Gansey laughed at the little choir without being able to help it. He was not able to help anything, soaked deep in such a surreal relief. 

With ten years on his life built insistently on _hope_ , he did now know who to thank for fixing a seemingly irreparable loss. It was the first time Gansey got something for himself without having to fight desperately for it.

He lifted his eyes to the sky again. 

The circle visible above him, right in the centre of the three intersecting trails, was slowly clearing off of smoke. Though the dust and sand were still heavy in the air, there was a single, tepid suggestion of sun filtering through.

Gansey dropped his head back between Adam and Ronan, and drew in the deepest breath against the safe reality of it. 

There would be hours, and days, and weeks coming next. _Time_ , to follow and to fill.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you made it all the way down, here's a bottle of water, I love you and cherish you and THANK YOU for sticking with me. I'm afraid the fact that I thought about this story way too much showed in this chapter.
> 
> Do stick around for the Epilogue, which will be the cherry on top of this epic work, coming out **Saturday 22nd**
> 
> I get excited for every hit on this work, kudos are love, but comments leave me with incoherent joy so PLEASE.
> 
> Additional screaming, questions, "MIST WHAT THE FUCK" and the like can be directed to [My Tumblr](http://seekthemist.tumblr.com)! I swear I don't bite!
> 
> See you next week, one last time all together.
> 
>  
> 
>  **Sad edit of 21/06** :  
> Unfortunately, people are evidently getting crazy with summer approaching and I got dumped a pile of stuff at work of the category of “This needs to be done YESTERDAY” and I’ve been working overtime way too much to squeeze what I wanted from the epilogue.
> 
> The epilogue will be out on **Saturday 29th** , as I’m handing in what I have to tomorrow and then I can focus on ALL THE SMUT this deserves *wink wink I know you wanted that* (but there will also be plot to wrap up completely with a little bow).
> 
> Please don’t hate me, I swear it’ll be worth it!!!


	8. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Super late in comparison with my usual update time, but in the crazy pace of the last week I ended up commuting for most of today in particular and the Internet was shit.
> 
> So, this is it. There is smut, there is action, there is politics, and there are plot twists, but this is still an epilogue.
> 
> One last time until the very end.

  
  
  


**Six months later**

 

The Hague, Netherlands, was the first European city Henry had ever set foot in. 

They had flown in from Beijing to Amsterdam, and knowing that a civilian flight would have been much more of a pain had not helped Henry’s claustrophobic boredom, so at some point he had given in and asked Gansey about the city. It had been about as uselessly and sickly entertaining as Henry could have hoped, which meant he had emerged from the conversation with a series of statistics and tactical considerations and very little about the city itself. 

The bottom line was that it was a populous city for the area, very active, and with an extended metropolitan area. As they drove in with several armoured cars, each with its retinue of security details, the first thing that Henry had noticed were the tall modern buildings jutting out of the flat Dutch landscape. By that point, he had taken in the fact that no part of this trip was going to be an escapade with his boyfriend and his girlfriend, and set the issue to rest.

After all, the purpose of this of this trip was the same that had monopolised the most of Gansey’s trivia: The Hague hosted the International Court of Justice of the United Nations, and after months of assessment and closed-doors discussions, the high-ranks of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps — and, in particular, the pilots — were expected to sit for a plenary hearing. 

Expecting any sort of leisure from this visit was too much even for wishful thinking.

Or so Henry had thought, before Helen gathered them all in an elevator and activated her most ominous comm-quenching device. 

“I don’t think you have trouble imagining how tense the situation is going to be, but let me tell you the U.N. looks like the Bronx during a gang fight at the moment,” she ushered, as if keeping this box radio silent on a trip to the thirtieth floor of this hotel for diplomats and friends was not enough. “The preparations for the hearing are going to be at least a day long. So I want you to avoid, in order, _motherfuckers_ of various natures, journalists, and curious civilians.”

Clearly appalled by the gravity of what could lead Helen to use curses, even though they made Ronan snicker like nothing else, Gansey asked, “And that does not involve just staying in our rooms?”

“Not if they know they can find you there.”

Ronan’s smile was widening, “Are you saying to make ourselves scarce, Helen?”

Helen returned the expression with something deceptively saccharine, “Yes, Ronan, fuck off.”

Ronan had lost it enough to worry some of the hotel’s staff when they arrived at the floor, but no one would have suspected the nature of the conversation that just happened — even though Ronan on a bad day seemed to be the inventor of maliciousness as a concept.

When they reconvened two hours later, it was with the full analysis of the task Helen had handled them. 

Their five rooms were the only ones on the whole floor, and they instinctively regrouped in Gansey’s room — a perfect carbon copy of the others, but certain patterns had to be respected even outside the Shatterdome.

“The rooms are not bugged,” Blue declared from her post occupying 90% of Gansey’s bed, once Adam closed the door behind his back. 

“But we’ve already established the elevator surely is,” Henry completed for clarity, glancing over the ample glass window that opened over an impossibly flat landscape barely recovered from the sea. There was a certain circular clarity, in being here after ten years at war with the Ocean. “And I suppose we want to leave without someone noticing immediately.”

“Of course, Cheng, we’re _fucking off_ ,” Ronan snickered. “The emergency exit door is alarmed. It’s not labelled, but it is, which means Parrish is gonna bypass it.”

Adam and Ronan were both resting against the entrance door, like two sphinxes, one of which might handle riddles and the other arson. Adam in basic civilian clothes always managed to look like a mixture between an average neighbourhood kid and a competent handyman. Henry really hoped he was not going to look at anyone around town and lift a single eyebrow as he did to Henry, in recognition of Ronan’s statement, because that _really_ showed how uncanny he was.

“Are you?” Gansey asked, more eager than questioning. Having renounced the high tech contact lenses in favour of some very mundane glasses only heightened the feeling of scholarly excitation at the prospect.

“I am, but you’re gonna help, come on Gansey,” Adam declared. 

Both Blue and Ronan snorted with a conspiratorial look at the way Gansey toppled over the edge of the bed in the haste of joining this new questionable procedure. 

And just like that, they were off.

It felt weird to think that a mere year ago it had been him and Blue, and some other miscellaneous people from the very mutable environment of the L.A. Shatterdome. They had met some of them — Cheng2, Lee Squared and Sicksteve that accompanied them — when they had been put in charge of the final clean up, but it had not been the same in any way.

Not only because the destruction of the entire Mark-III series was in effect an unrecoverable discontinuation of the Jaeger program, nor for the fact that whatever they had caused during the battle of Hong Kong had made any Kaiju residue virtually useless. It was more about how the rest of the world felt miles away from their little cluster of five. 

As Gansey and Adam dealt with the safety exit with a precision usually reserved for disarming bombs, Blue and Ronan slid away with two faces that made them look like they were ready to plant some. They would not — or so Henry hoped — but they could surely cause an amount of distress sufficient to distract the hotel from the sappers at the end of the corridor. Henry remained happily sprawled on the couch of Gansey’s room, the door ajar, synching all of their five phones with encrypted maps and possible interesting locations.

“What’s that face for?” Gansey asked, coming back in the room with Adam quitely in tow. 

Henry did not even attempt to control his eyebrows, waving his phone with the result of his quick survey of Things To Do In The Hague. “You really research like shit if all you told me for three damn hours during the flight was all you knew about The Hague. Are you done?”

“What do you mean, I’ve been to the Netherlands before — I mean the U.N. would surely deserve a more in depth explanation, but…” Gansey started, and then trailed off.

“Yeah, we’re done, you’ve got everything?” Adam inserted himself smoothly exactly in the point where Gansey’s voice had died out, as if someone had given him a timer. 

Henry huffed his disdain at Gansey again, wordlessly, and then unfolded from the couch, handing Adam his and Ronan’s phones back. “Sweet, then let’s go recover those two before they can send staff and security details to therapy and let’s try to hit the ground.”

_Hitting the ground_ was smoother than most plans they had executed before, but only because their plans tended to be a mental combination of a special force mission and a group of teenagers with some kind of compulsion. Following Henry’s maps of the perimeter, they ended up going out of doors that dutifully did not ring when opened — and were quickly connected again to cover their traces — and cutting through no less than five back alleys before deciding that they could relax. 

“So, I say we go see what’s the city centre has to offer,” Henry suggested.

Ronan — who constantly occupied their backguard every time they moved as a team — was the last to jump off a grating that made a dead-end out of a back alley lined up with rubbish bins. He shook his shoulders distractedly, not quite looking at any of them, and then said, “You do that, Parrish owns me dinner...from ages ago.”

There was something skittish about the way he said it that made Henry and Blue exchange a private, pointed look. 

“You’re gonna survive all alone without causing a diplomatic incident?” Gansey asked, apparently oblivious of any underlying dynamic.

“What the fuck do you think?” Ronan snapped back, without any heat, and started walking without really keeping on the conversation. “Parrish has both phones.”

“And I even know how to use them,” Adam added, with a little mockery underneath, “Keep us posted every couple of hours max, okay?”

With that settled, Henry watched them heading off for a few seconds too long — but Blue and Gansey seemed to be doing much of the same thing. Less than fifteen steps off, without even looking at each other, Ronan and Adam had reached for each other’s hands and held on tight. Just before turning the corner, off their vision, Ronan lifted their hands and tossed his arm around Adam’s shoulders, dragging him close. It should have been uncomfortable, and brutally awkward, to walk like that for more than two steps, but instead Ronan and Adam slid against each other by the hips with a mindless pace, their strides impeccably synched. 

It was intimate and affectionate, but it was also _something more_.

"You're still not gonna talk about it?" Blue asked, just a brush of a standing argument that was never quite closed nor open.

"They're doing much better, there is nothing to comment for their being together," Gansey replied, starting to move rather than risking a full-on engagement.

Blue rolled her eyes at Henry but he just wrinkled his nose, refusing to tip the current balance. It was difficult to say if Gansey was right or she was. 

Ronan and Adam had been bad, after the battle. Each of them had been on a shift in the Med bay, for every time Ronan's nose, or mouth, or ears started dribbling in black. If it was not him, it was Adam, having to confess in a subdued voice, "I can't see," with too-bright eyes that would only regain sight hours later. And sometimes it was the both of them, burning with fever at exactly the same temperature.

But the pace had slowed. Declan had not found a cause or a solution but the last time Henry got paged for one of these random illnesses had been more than a month ago.

It was going better, Henry wanted it to get better and he wanted to see a new place with Gansey and Blue without worrying about Ronan and Adam collapsing somewhere — even though he did.

Getting to the historic city centre in a mixture of buses that proudly proclaimed unfamiliar destinations in an unknown language stuck Henry as a remarkably teenage experience, one they were too old for. 

Gansey was endearingly insufferable throughout the process, excitable like a kid and overly careful like a time traveller at the same time. Henry held his hand with studied unselfconsciousness, letting Gansey play with his fingers and knuckles exactly in the way Blue would have never tolerated.

Distracted as he was from studying his personal Gansey specimen in the wild, the arrival at their chosen stop took Henry by surprise. They got off the bus and found themselves in a twist of little streets and small buildings. Even polished by modernity, there was an oldness in them that Henry had not found in L.A. and that was fundamentally different to ancient Korean architecture. 

It was like an illustration out of a fairy tale book, and in this strangeness Henry felt for the first time like there could be a future untouched by the Corps.

By the glittering in Blue's eyes and the strength of Gansey's fingers twinned with his own, he must not be the only one.

They roamed around like a group of middle schoolers with free time during a school trip, and Henry made sure of having his severely encrypted smartphone on hand to track each of their movements in more than just a map.

After all, Blue's barely-concealed delight when Gansey presented her with a bouquet of bright red tulips deserved to be immortalised in a picture. So did Gansey in general, disregarding the stealth requirements of their little restorative mission to stop oblivious locals and make them translate obscure commemorative plaques from Dutch.

Maybe it was the carelessness that played through them, at the end, or maybe there was no way to slide under the radar the day before one of the most anticipated hearings of the International Court of justice.

"Journalists," Gansey announced from one moment to another, without changing a single fraction of his expression.

"Of course," Blue gritted out but did not turn to look at anything that might have attracted Gansey's attention. 

Even Henry, who was close enough to a shop window to make good use of the mirror inside it, could barely see them, but Gansey would always be the most phenomenal at tracking things and people hidden in plain sight.

"The phones are synched, right?" Henry asked, even while checking by himself. "Let's play cat and mouse, what do you think?"

There was a low snickering from the both of them — one that made Henry feel better in the evidence that they could still be on the same line even though Blue and Gansey's minds were maddeningly out of reach.

"Sure but anything interesting we find we bring back, mh?" Blue proposed, as usual if The Hague was there to play treasure hunt with them.

On that agreement, they separated - not all at once but causally. 

Blue slid sideways just in time for a group of tourists to open around them and was not there anymore when they passed. Gansey trailed off in a shop and never emerged, but neither got cornered by the people that strolled casually inside after him.

With a little private smile, Henry walked just a bit faster, enough to hop on a bus with an apologetic smile to the driver right before the doors closed, and let himself be driven away just like this.

He slid off with a vague "Thank you, bye" to the driver after a point of intense traffic jam, and proceeded to the riverside. The light was lowering fast, painting the thin clouds in the sky with a bright orange gradually swallowed by the deep blue creeping from the East. The calm waters and the ducks that occupied them were impossibly quiet after the previous agitation and Henry made sure to take enough pictures to share the experience with Gansey and Blue.

After, rather than following the lure of the terraced shop on the riverside, he stopped next to a little cart and smiled brilliantly to the old Dutch lady behind it. There was no need to understand the unintelligible words that covered the front of the cart to grasp the purpose of the hot dogs on the grill and to counterbalance the unknown varieties in unfamiliar shapes and colours Henry just brought one of each.

When he pinged his location to Gansey and Blue, the name just said " _Dinner_."

The return signals came overlapping in the same location somewhere on the other corner of the city centre. " _Take away?_ "

Reaching them without having to mix up his trail for hoards of journalists was easy enough, even though the mental projections of how exactly the two of them managed to reunite already kept him amused and entertained for the whole trip back. Given Blue's impatience for navigating urban centres alone and Gansey's tendency to accommodate any need that he could personally provide to, Henry could sort of bet on plausible scenarios.

The hypotheses became more dubious when the location turned out to be a hotel nestled at the edge of the medieval city, only two floors high and two windows wide and then a little pointy roof. 

"Oh yes, welcome!" A girl probably even younger than him told him, without waiting for Henry to introduce his enquiry. "They did say you could not be mistaken for anyone else! Last floor!"

The wording and the little wink associated with the encouraging handwave definitely tipped Henry off towards a different level of shenanigans but still did not provide answers.

He rapped at the door of the only room at the last floor before lowering the handle. It opened for him with no resistance, leaving way to a cosy attic with partially diagonal walls and wooden furniture. There was only a bedside lamp turned on and the shadows were long in the dark that followed sunset.

"Hello, my loves, have you been naughty to the lady downstairs?"

"No, absolutely not," Blue replied promptly, as if she had been waiting for an entrance exactly like this, with Henry coming in with his bag of hot dogs and closing the door behind him. "Have we, Gansey?"

"No…" 

The reply came with a split second of hesitation and slightly choked off. 

Gansey was grasping at the long side of a drawer, looking up at Henry even though his head hung with the chin closer to the chest. One of Blue's slender hands was holding onto his shoulders, and his trousers lingered precariously around his knees, the unbuckled belt hanging freely to the side.

"Are you fucking Gansey with the door open?" 

The question alone made Gansey groan low in his throat, which would have been answer enough. 

"More like we were waiting for you with the door open...to see how to start," Blue winked at Henry, plenty cheerful behind Gansey's ample shoulders.

Henry felt himself smile, making a point of not locking the door and just leaving the bag with the food close to the wall at the entrance.

"Are you gonna tell me how you're fucking Gansey in the middle of The Hague?"

She just smiled back but jerked Gansey back in a way that seemed to make a point enough to bring Gansey to tell him, "She brought me a new strap-on."

Henry could not contain the laughter that followed, tossing his jacket on a chair and taking his shoes off — more than Blue and Gansey had bothered doing, considering all their things still scattered around between the drawer itself and the floor around them. “Now that does sound like a story I would like to hear. You really took the reduced baggage personally, B., mh?”

Blue scoffed, her eyes following Henry around even as one hand stroked down Gansey’s arms and pulled him back by the elbow, sending his chest closer to the drawer. Gansey went with the motion all too agreeably, a little moan filtering out his clenched teeth. “I would have brought it regardless. That’s why we had to wait for Henry, right?” 

Gansey nodded, a blind agreement considering how he seemed almost anxiously uncertain. It was the same anticipation that glowed on Blue’s face, glistening in her eyes even though her dark skin did not flush. There was a split second of stillness, one that got even Henry to tense were he stood waiting for the ball to drop. Then Blue reached between her chest and Gansey’s back. 

They both jumped immediately after, and Gansey shut his eyes tight as Blue canted backwards and then forward as if in retaliation of anything that might have overtook them. 

Looking at them was a pleasure in itself, and a part of Henry would gladly sit down on the bed across them and observe the procedure until Blue and Gansey were done playing. It was not like he had not done it before. But there was something about today — the unfamiliarity of it, the new places separated from the routine — that makes Henry too hard to stand back, too willing to make the most of his lovers waiting for him. Too desperate to see what they could be, far enough away from the Corps that they might not exist at all. 

There was a low hum coming in waves through the room, barely audible above Blue and Gansey’s laboured breaths. 

“Does it vibrate?” Henry asked, leaning with a side against the drawer and combing Gansey’s hair away from his face. 

Gansey rocked forward slightly with another thrust, and his head made a weird movement in an attempt to lean against Henry’s touch and dropping his cheek on the wood. Pressed to the side, his glasses tilted awkwardly as he nodded.

“Oh, that’s so good,” Henry said, and delicately slid the glasses off to place them away from Gansey’s grasping hands.

Blue gave a little laugh and the humming got a bit stronger, making Gansey groan against Henry’s hand.

This was going to be _fun_.

  
  


* * *

  
  


In retrospect, it might have been Gansey’s fault for entering a shop just because it appeared to be big, with multiple doors and no clear window looking into the inside. He had been focused on getting rid of journalists, not on having a good shopping experience. By the time the door had jingled close behind him and an extensive arrangement of sexual paraphernalia flashed before his eyes, it was too late to go back.

Maybe he would have been more inclined to take his exit immediately, be it not for the fact that every clerk around the shop barely acknowledged his existence long enough to greet him and then left him to his own devices. Discretion, he supposed, was key for these types of businesses. Not that Gansey knew much of it. He knew about strategy, and mechanics, and physics — occasionally, when he could spare energy and time for it, he knew about history and Welsh kings. Relationship and sexual adventurousness were not his area of expertise. Ronan would have sure begged to differ, considering how different their teenage experiences in the Corps had been and the fact that Gansey had a boyfriend and a girlfriend. But it was still true.

His boyfriend and girlfriend had been, however, very clear in Gansey’s mind as he had roamed around without being able to help himself. A lot of objects were instinctually familiar or just blatant in their possible usage enough to give a little thrill down Gansey’s spine. Others had weird shapes and more obscure purposes that he would not attempt to investigate, or were just so absurdly _huge_ in a way that made Gansey’s stomach a little queasy. 

“Would you like any of that?” Blue had asked, suddenly appearing behind his shoulders as he looked over a wall full of strap-ons, double-ended toys and anal beads, each cheekily suggesting that he test the power of vibration with the sampler. 

He had startled at that, forgetting to ask how Blue had gotten there with him in favour of trying to enforce a retreat from the shop. She had dashed off and he had to chase her around the shop, losing her several times, but once they had made it out he had thought that would be the end of it for the day — if not for the teasing, at least for the substance.

When she had dragged him under the doorframe of an inconspicuous bed&breakfast, though, the box that peeked from her bag when she had put it under his nose suggested that the game had just escalated, if anything. 

“I know you want to try it…” Blue had whispered, syrupy like sin, and Gansey had stayed silent for two seconds too long. Enough for her to surge up to kiss him, and make him half-hard and agreeable.

It had only gone downhill from there, with Blue whispering in a conspiring way with the receptionist and him standing awkwardly in a corner as the two of them glanced and giggled among themselves. Flushing and averting his gaze just in case had not eased the undertone of teasing.

But maybe it had been worth it, for the dimly lit attic room and Blue pressing him against the drawer. She had pulled him down with her arms looped around his shoulders at any odd time she was not dropping their belongings around and stripping odd pieces of clothing off. 

The escalation from _turned on_ to _desperately hard_ had been embarrassingly fast, and Gansey had been all too ready to kneel at Blue’s feet just to have somewhere to go that did not involve just the urgency in his mind. Or maybe lifting Blue’s skirt up had been in the background of his thoughts since the very first moment Gansey had seen her version of _civilian clothing_ — something that Ronan might have called _a lamp_ but Gansey felt looked more like a bellflower. 

He had barely dragged her panties off when he licked the inside of her left leg, all the way up until he could tongue between her labia. With one knee pressed against Gansey’s shoulders, Blue had the perfect leverage to rock back and forth against Gansey’s open mouth, chasing the contact with one hand behind Gansey’s nape and the other behind him on the drawer.

“You’re so _damn_ good at this,” she had moaned, and it had tingled along Gansey’s skin. He would have liked to tell her that everyone can excel in the things they love, usually, but he had been really otherwise occupied. 

In the same way she had kept him close, Blue had dragged Gansey off her — to his great disappointment considering how promising her shivering had been. But kicking the package close to Gansey’s knees she had asked, “Don’t you want it on?”

Gansey did, so much that it had been difficult to remember what else he had wanted from this afternoon in particular, apart from _this_.

He had fumbled a fair bit with the harness, and not only because of the shadows lengthening around them. He had taken Blue’s skirt off and brought her leg back up against his shoulder. Like this, at least, it had been easy enough to slide the inner end of the dildo inside her — _oh so gently_ , and yet Blue still dug her nails in Gansey’s nape. Gansey had kissed along her belly, as she adjusted the harness, and that had seemed to mollify her a bit. 

“Am I gonna feel how you feel when you fuck me?” She had asked, tilting Gansey’s head up.

With a hand stroking up her back and the ground swaying under his feet, Gansey had only managed to reply, “God, I hope so,” before the phone in his trousers pinged with Henry’s ringtone.

Blue had laughed with another gentle scratch over Gansey’s nape, “What timing, what is he saying?”

Under the bright light of the phone screen turning on, the dildo that hung from the strap-on had looked long — longer than Gansey had gauged by hand, very distracting. “That...mh...he’s off on the river, with dinner.”

“Well, then tell him we want take-away,” Blue had suggested, deceptively, and had dragged Gansey all the way up his feet. “You’re too tall,” she had complained — which was not exactly a rare argument. Turning him around and bending him over the edge of the drawer seemed to fix it. 

It had taken Gansey some fumbling to ping back the location to Henry — “ _Take away?_ ” — and even more to check on Ronan and Adam — together somewhere off the city centre, green as per last check-in time. The fact that Blue had been undoing his trousers and dragging them down with his boxers _definitely_ had not helped. 

“Are we not gonna wait for Henry?” Gansey had gasped, putting his phone down on the drawer with a bit too much force as Blue smeared lube along the crack of his ass without even trying to delay the final purpose.

“Of course we’re gonna wait for him,” she whispered, kissing the back of Gansey’s neck without even bothering to strip him further. The perfunctory way she had pushed lube inside him, rather than properly fingering him, made Gansey’s head sway as much as the rest of the setting. “You are dying to wait for him, aren’t you?”

There had been more lube on the length of the dildo than inside Gansey, and he could only swallow and nod desperately. Blue had pushed him back until he had been at the right height, the right angle, for the toy to slide inside almost as an afterthought. 

“You have to wait,” Blue had reminded him, with just the right amount of teasing to make Gansey’s breath burn in his lungs and rocking slowly back and forth — a foreplay rather than a proper means to an end.

It had been a long, torturous wait, but Gansey _had_ waited — just to have them both in the same room, together with him as they should be. 

And now Henry was there, and Gansey could only hope he would know what to do with him, as he did not know what to do with himself.

“Does it vibrate?”

Gansey gave up on the attempt at looking up at Henry in favour of closing his eyes, because the fingers combing his hair felt just _so good_ and at the same time they expanded the tingling coming up his spine. It did not matter how slowly Blue fucked in and out of him, not with the slow buzzing sparking from around his rim all the way inside him. Gansey’s grip on the drawer slipped off, but the wood felt cool against his cheek even though his glasses flipped half away from his face. The nod came belatedly, but Henry was never really demanding about replies and conversations during sex — he could hold them with Blue, and just give Gansey his time.

“Oh, that’s so good,” Henry told him, and stroked Gansey’s face while sliding his glasses off. 

The world went blurry, but it was already blurry, and dark, and Gansey could simply clench his fists and trying to work on reaching for Henry.

Or he would have, if not for the little jump of the vibrator inside him — like a click, the only warning for the whirring shaking him harder, _deeper_. Gansey groaned against Henry’s palm and Blue laughed, rubbing his thumbs along Gansey’s cheek in a way that only encouraged more clenching. 

“I knew you would love this,” Blue whispered, bending down to stroke her cheek against the creased shirt on Gansey’s back. Her breath was shivering also, and it was all too easy to remember that whatever vibration he was feeling, _she_ was feeling also. 

It did not necessarily made it more bearable. 

“Yes,” he still admitted, because it was true. 

“Is she fucking you hard enough?” Henry asked, still combing back his hair. 

“No…” 

They both laughed at this, even though Blue followed on with muttering something unintelligible about _neediness_ and _fussiness_. Gansey did not get to reply about it, because she upped the vibration again and he was too busy arching under her, and then getting pinned with his whole chest to the drawer when she pressed down on him with a forearm.

The buckling of a belt brought him vaguely back into focus enough to get an impression of Henry sliding his cock out at the soft orange light of the single lamp that cleared the after twilight darkness. 

“Oh my God,” he breathed out, bucking back against Blue’s pace as he reached with one hand to drag Henry forward. 

Henry chuckled a bit but still lifted Gansey’s chin with two fingers, “What the hell have you done to him to spin him so high, B.?”

“Nothing, I got him like this,” Blue replied, breathing hard as if she was not the one keeping the vibration high enough to make Gansey’s knees tremble. 

“Must be the Dutch air,” Henry whispered, in a way that made the mundane sentence sound three times filthier. 

Maybe it was not the tone, maybe it was the slow drag of Henry’s cock over Gansey’s lips until Gansey opened up wide and sucked him inside, with very little pretense of having every wanted anything else but this. 

After that, it was a blur of perfect warmth, the kind that belonged only to Henry and Blue. Gansey could trust them unquestionably with this and was glad that they would handle anything he would now know how to direct by himself. 

It was easier to stay mostly still, apart from any moment in which the whirring inside him got so impeccably persistent Gansey just could not help but arch up against Blue’s body. But he could always return to the hard wooden surface, the air thin in his nostrils as Henry’s cock slid in and out of his mouth. He blinked up at Henry only when a gentle touch of two fingers wiped the spit from sliding towards his chin, and the dark eyes that met his gaze were so intense that Gansey bucked over another wave of oversensitivity. 

“Fuck…” Blue hissed from behind him, digging her fingers in Gansey’s shoulder and rocking into him hard enough that the drawer creaked slightly against the floor. 

Gansey could not quite figure if he was coming or the persistent vibrations spreading at the pace that Blue’s imposed were just short circuiting his brain. He could figure much better that she was coming, trembling in little jerking motions that devolved into a low level shivering as she let her weight go against Gansey’s body. She rocked in little uneven motions, riding her orgasms off thrust after thrust inside Gansey, and then she pulled at his hair very unceremoniously, stealing him away from Henry’s cock just to kiss him short and bruisingly. 

And then she was done, too oversensitive to keep the vibrations up, and slid out of Gansey almost too suddenly. Leaning too heavily against the drawer, Gansey moaned every other breath, not quite satisfied and yet incredibly overwhelmed. His right hand still clawed at Henry’s hips, until Henry himself peeled it off to intertwine their fingers together. 

“Do you need a break?” Henry whispered to him, as if he was not incredibly hard and wet of Gansey’s spit right in front of him. 

At the corner of Gansey’s eyes, Blue was lying down on the bed, still mostly dressed in a way that made Gansey’s bones shiver for how hard he had just taken it. He hummed and moaned a bit, incapable of providing a real answer.

He wanted to stop for a bit and stop shivering. He wanted to come properly and be done with it. He wanted Henry to fuck his mouth and give him the vibrations back until he could not think anymore. He wanted more, and less, and exactly this, and different.

Having a plan was so difficult, in these instances. That was why Blue and Henry were so much better in handling it.

“‘Cause I was thinking…” Henry went on, unperturbed, and still slid his cock back into Gansey’s mouth as an afterthought. The eager sucking on it made him trail off, which was deeply satisfying in itself. “I was... _ah_...I was thinking...that you should fuck me a-as good...as B. just fucked you.”

The sentence alone made a groan rumble deep in Gansey’s rib cage before he even fully registered the meaning of it. When he actually did, he slid off Henry’s cock with a wet, half-choking sound, looking up at him for a couple of two long seconds. His own cock jumped just at the sight, painfully hard and wound tight with pleasure.

“Yeah...yes...no break...yeah, I’m good,” Gansey wheezed, scrambling a little ungraceful to get up from where Blue had pushed him on the drawer to begin with.

“Nice,” Henry dragged him right off, definitely helping with the process of getting to the bed even though kissing halfway through meant bumping on different furniture and half-lowered clothes in the process.

But there was no rush, and Blue was laughing a bit breathlessly on the mattress when they finally toppled over it. 

Gansey wanted this bubble to last forever, to expand and engulf his whole world until none of them had to know any other obligation.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The huge futuristic pier opened off the beach of Scheveningen shielded the burning light of the setting sun, and the ferris wheel was all orange and yellow, mutable like the sea water underneath. The point where The Hague faced the open waters was quiet and tame, still populated by seagulls and people, and thin clouds hung low in the sky, as if flattened by the latitude. It was a universe away from the Pacific Ocean, and Ronan would never question why, among all the possible destinations in an unknown city, he and Adam ended up wandering where the air was salty but devoid of humidity, the sand soft underneath their bare feet. 

Nestled against the concrete wall of what looked like an old bathing hut, Ronan was making out with Adam with all the leisure the mandatory escape for the day allowed them. The high tide was approaching in lazy waves, and Ronan unconsciously followed their rhythm as he ran a hand over Adam’s leg. Or maybe it was Adam that was following the waves, as he licked insistently into Ronan’s mouth and creased the back of his shirt both close to his waist and around his shoulders. It was too blatant for something not behind closed doors, and Ronan would not want it any other way, _exactly_ because they would never do this on Shatterdome grounds. 

With his eyes closed, and their bodies pressed against each other, Ronan gave up the kiss only when his lungs protested too vehemently. His cheek rubbed affectionately against Adam’s as Adam tilted his head sideways — Ronan had not asked, or gestured, but of course it was what he wanted, just like Adam had not asked to be jostled closer, but Ronan still pulled him in. He kissed along the span of Adam’s neck, savouring every spot where his deep breaths and Adam’s jumping pulse met and mingled. 

Under the wrap of his arm around Adam’s waist, the grumbling of Adam’s stomach was a tactile sensation. 

Ronan laughed and rubbed his nose all the way behind Adam’s right ear. “Let’s go have dinner.”

“No, it’s fine,” Adam hummed, kissing the side of Ronan’s cheek in the only point he could reach.

“You’re hungry, let’s go eat,” Ronan insisted, biting on Adam’s lobe in a way that elicited a very different kind of hunger. He knew, on a very fundamental level, that nothing would make Adam more quietly miserable than hunger — not cold, not pain, not stress, but _hunger_. “Or are you craving a level of garlic that would keep me from kissing you for the rest of the week?”

Adam snorted and pushed him away, “Fuck off, don’t tempt me.”

They disentangled in a single motion, steady and precise, and their hands were in each other’s grip before the second step away from the beach. 

It had been good so far, smooth like the day out of an ospice. The fact that a beach was not the first place you would hunt for two soldiers on leave had probably helped in keeping the worst of the _assorted motherfuckers_ off their backs. And Ronan was sure Adam will buy him dinner, which left a weird thrill down his back. It was nothing, and it felt like the steady flow of a date with his boyfriend — maybe not the first, but definitely the only one that felt like pure indulgence so far.

Which was of course the moment something in the grip of Adam’s hand on his own changed — subtle but plenty sufficient to make Ronan turn towards him. 

His clear blue eyes had something vacant in them, too wide in the artificial lighting of the street. There was silence around them, as they had been walking out of the crowded routes to try and find the legendary dinner, but Adam carried himself as if everything was very crowded.

Dread surfaced in his mind, with the well-founded fear that Adam would tell him again, helpless, _Ronan, I can’t see anything_. And Ronan, again, would not know how to help more than Adam could help him if he were to start oozing black goo from every orifice. 

But Adam seem to be looking at him — and then right through him. 

“Down.”

It was a single word, in bland tone, so Ronan did not quite know what made him react so promptly. It echoed in his mind like a lifeline being stuck, and he was ducking beside Adam — with Adam — without even needing to let go of his hand to have full mobility.

A whistle passed above their heads, immediately followed by the bang of a projectile piercing through the wall behind them. 

Adrenaline sparked through Ronan’s veins like the self-igniting fuel of a well-honed machine. He would never know if war had been in his nature, but it was definitely integral in his nurture, and his fight-or-flight instinct was actually _fight only_ , even outside a Jaeger.

But leaning against Adam’s side made everything feel as effortless as piloting had been, just pure instinct bringing him two steps forward, one backwards, one sideways. He was not looking at Adam but he caught himself following the same pace, though not quite a perfect synch because they had two bodies and not just one to command.

It was disorienting but there was no time to make anything else out of it.

Not with someone shooting at them in the relative darkness of an isolated street, and two figures closing around them at the corner of their eyes.

The shots were coming from the upper left, the sound muffled by a silencer. They moved off in a concert of projectiles cracking the cobblestones under their feet. In retrospect Ronan should have wondered about the ease of their movements, the lack of actual hits even though the sniper must have clear visual — as it was, he only distantly saw himself and Adam in his mind, Adam leading them in something fluid and frantic at the same time, always taking the right step off the shooting line. 

There was no time to think, no time to regret the unavoidable need to split. 

He met Adam’s eyes briefly — so bright, like a trick — and Adam nodded without even needing to question the steps forward Ronan wanted to take. 

In the current escalation this, and only this, rang with reassurance. Adam was with him, _so close_ , and they could make it out.

Old architecture did have some blessing, apart from the fact that the walls embedded the bullets rather than rebounding them off. Ronan found his first footing on an old protounding brick, the second on the ridge between two different colour of wall paneling, the third on the drainpipe. Then he reached over and he hoisted himself up the narrow balcony of the first floor. 

It was evident that the sniper did not expect him because he had not managed to take the precision rifle out of its tripod to point it directly at Ronan. A serious underestimation, for someone attempting to assassinate two pilots of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps. Ronan was not dressed for a raid, he was dressed for a night out as a civilian, but that was barely an impediment towards tackling the man he found in front of him. 

The fight that followed was messy, in an excessively cramped space that Ronan really applied brutally to his own advantage. He smashed the man against the window frame, hearing the hinges cracking. Trying to avoid the rushed stabbing aimed at his side cost Ronan a vertiginously strong right hook on his jaw, but Niall had trained him for far worse. With one hand snapping at his opponent's neck and the other right at the bend of his elbow, the second crack that followed was the man’s dislocated shoulder. 

“Fuck you,” Ronan hissed, for good measure, and ignored the pained noise of the stranger in favour of hauling him off the railing of the balcony. 

It was not that big of a fall, and Adam chose exactly that moment to kick one of the two people he was stalling right in the knees. They toppled over enough to end up in the fall trajectory, and two bodies hit the floor instead of one.

Ronan jumped off the balcony and back to the street right after, even though Adam was holding his ground rather excellently. Seeing him up close but not immediately joining his flow gave Ronan a flash of perspective — the wildness that Adam channeled so well mediated by a disturbing precision, as if he was following a rhythm that not even Ronan could quite catch. 

He could not stand there and stare, though, not considering that one of the people they toppled over each other was getting up and the third one was still keeping Adam plenty engaged.

But they had flipped the opponents’ tactical advantage of the surprise, so it was faster and neater than it would ever have been if the bullet had actually hit Ronan at the first shot.

Ronan tackled the man to the ground before he could get back up from underneath the sniper with the dislocated shoulder, and slammed his head against the cobblestones for good measure to ensure that he _stayed down_. 

He would have gotten back up, but somehow he just _knew_ to hold still, crouched on the asphalt keeping Adam’s back. The push of a foot on his back came next — _Adam’s_ because Ronan could recognise him by _weight_ apparently — and Ronan could do nothing but hold steady on the pavement. He turned his head in time to get an impression Adam leveraging off him like a platform, and landing a knee in the last opponent’s face with a boundless and creative brutality that always made something tingle in Ronan’s stomach. 

Adam stumbled and flopped down on the street floor just as Ronan let go as well. They sat back to back, with three knocked-down bodies around them and a rifle still set up for precision shooting on the first floor above them. Along the length of his spine, Adam was breathing heavily — almost _too_ heavily — and when he tossed his head back to lean against Ronan’s shoulder, looking up at the flat night sky, Ronan could see the sweat, the goosebumps, excessive even for this amount of adrenaline.

“Adam, what have you done?” he whispered, incapable of wording it in any other way. 

“I don’t know…” Adam panted, rubbing his cheek against Ronan’s shoulder. “I don’t know.”

Ronan did not know either, so he just lifted a hand and pressed it against Adam’s eyes and forehead, between a hideaway and just comfort. Adam grabbed onto Ronan’s wrist to keep him there, and said nothing. With the other hand, he wordlessly handed Ronan one of the phones.

With his cheek pressing on the crown of Adam’s head, Ronan dialled a number by pure memory and waited for the encrypted connection to establish. He only had to wait two rings.

“Helen,” Ronan sighed into the phone. “We have a situation.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


They made it back to the same governmental hotel in an indistinct point of the night, late enough that the traffic of The Hague had trickled off to some sparse cars and even sparser bikes. 

The same lockdown that had been a suffocating cage to escape from was a welcome relief after hours of debriefing, analysis of the scene, preliminary interrogation of the suspects. They still sneaked their way in rather than walking through the main door, which would have meant signalling to every onlooker that they eluded every previous security. 

There were five rooms, one for each of them, but that arrangement had already been disregarded when they first arrived. When they entered the room assigned to Ronan both their luggage where they had left it, aligned together in a corner with military efficiency. 

“I’ll go shower,” Adam said, dropping his clothes on the way to the ensuite bathroom as one would do to rush to the preparation room. His gestures had none of the adrenaline of it, though, and Adam just felt weary and tired. 

At the end, once again, their dinner had been cobbled together by the supplies in a safehouse slightly off the city, in an area that was mostly lakes and parks. Mr Gray had been on the lookout with the usual efficiency — never there until he was because you needed him — and they had raked through everything they could get from their assailant, or _on_ them. Which had not been much, but better than nothing, in the prospect of tomorrow’s hearing.

Adam had been perfectly focused and worryingly distant throughout the whole process — poised, powerful, further away.

Ronan lasted ten minutes before barging into the bathroom. 

Barefoot and stripping off his t-shirt in his path, he slid the white curtain away without even acknowledging the change of plans. At the other side of it, Adam was leaning against the wall, naked and battered by a loud stream hot enough to fog up every mirror in the room. Ronan shut the water closed with a smack of his hand, and there was no protest for that either.

They looked at each other for several long seconds, face to face to start with, before Adam’s eyes trailed along Ronan’s body and then back up. He pushed himself away from the wall and reached for Ronan exactly as Ronan made to pull him off.

Ronan kissed the water away from Adam’s mouth, combing his wet darkened hair back. Not even the sudden frenzy caught him alone, if the biting kisses and the fumbling efforts of Adam in taking Ronan’s trousers down were anything to go by.

“They could have killed us,” Adam gasped, in the fleeting time that took Ronan to step away from his clothes.

“You saved my life,” Ronan countered, still deeply aware of how close to his head the whistle had passed. 

The statement came, of course, without the associated question: how?

_Down_ , Adam had said, even though the sniper did not have a laser aim and he had been completely out Adam’s field of view at the point. And then there was every little movement, every synched gesture. 

Ronan still felt Adam under his fingertips with more than just touch. It was so intense that it made his skin tingle.

He refused to ask, to discuss further. 

He turned, bringing Adam around with him and crowding him against the sink cabinet. Another kiss, and Adam’s hands dragged along his naked back, amplifying the contact. Ronan hoisted him up just because he could, and with Adam perched at the edge of the cabinet they were even closer, with Adam’s legs on his sides and their chest so much closer. It was always better, like this.

“I wanna…” Adam drawled, incomplete and slightly incoherent already.

“God, yes,” Ronan agreed to everything that lingered between the lines.

He reached blindly for the lube in his pack of toiletries, and even just the feeling of it as he ran one hand over the crack of Adam’s ass made Ronan three times harder. 

One finger slid in easily, so easily the jump in Adam’s breath was almost an afterthought. The second one at least required some adjustment, and Adam broke away from the kiss with a little urgent murmur that carried no real sentence. 

Ronan fingered him harder than he would have had in another situation, sliding a third finger inside almost in retaliation against Adam kissing Ronan’s cheek right at the point of the impact of the sniper’s fist. It hurt dully and Adam’s lips were wet and open. They both ended up moaning as the sensation bumped back and forth them in an unpredictable path along their bodies.

Adam’s body moved in a little wave, chasing the best angle for himself, by himself, and he was just as eager as he slipped in and out of focus.

“You’re gonna stay with me,” Ronan murmured, pressing a kiss over Adam’s ear. “Stay with me.” 

“I’m…” Adam started and trailed off. His whole body twitched up as Ronan’s fingers curled just right to tap against his prostate. The next sentence was cracked in a moan, and yet the substance of it did not change. “I’m trying, help me, I’m trying.”

Ronan did not know what it meant — what it _could_ mean, in its full extension — but his chest still swelled with something that was partially terror towards the blind attempt, partially unabashed _need_.

He slid his fingers out of Adam, all too slippery to grasp at Adam’s ass right away, but with both his arms looped around his shoulders it was all too easy for Ronan to lift him off the cabinet almost completely. 

“Oh God…” Adam hissed, thrusting his hips in a maddening motion that dragged Ronan’s cock all the way along the crack of his ass.

Ronan had to press his arm all the way across Adam’s back to plaster them together and actually slide inside him — just the tip, first, and then so much more because Adam jerked away.

“Ah…” Adam bit down on Ronan’s shoulder, and still managed to squirm around more in a way that made every adjustment into an effort. 

This was not usual at all — not for Adam, who moved through life, and through war, and through sex in a persistent but analytic way. His tipping points tended to unravel differently, slowly and then all at the same time in a final rush. Ronan had experienced it with a scorching hot inebriation the first time he had fucked Adam, seeing him spin out of control with a slow twisting grip on the sheets as he kneeled face-down on the narrow bed of Ronan’s room. 

Now it was different, frantic in a way that was electric to the touch, but Ronan wanted him equally, shamelessly.

“Will you stay fucking still,” he groaned, still, trying to figure out how to handle the warmth that coursed through him in waves.

“Just fuck me,” Adam insisted, as if Ronan was just being difficult in complying with a simple request.

“Well, you’re not making it _fucking easy_ ,” Ronan hissed.

But it was. It was easy.

Ronan grabbed more firmly at the top of Adam’s legs and jostled him higher bodily. Halfway through the movement, he felt the pressure of the bent of Adam’s knees fitting perfectly against his waist. Spotlessly in synch.

It was as easy as they could make it. 

Ronan slammed Adam against the wall of the bathroom and thrust into him exactly like he meant to.

They both moaned at the impetus. Ronan felt his knees buckle as Adam clenched around him, but he straightened up again and Adam ground down on his cock and it was _easy_.

Easy, and overwhelmingly good in a bathroom that was still thick with steam and echoed each and every one of their breaths, the thump of Adam’s back against the wall and the dragging of Ronan’s bare feet against the slippery floor. 

Ronan could feel the sweat collecting in the middle of his back, but when Adam spread his hands over both his shoulder blades the contact was firm, unyielding. Adam curled over him, with his head nestled in the curve of Ronan’s neck, and Ronan felt the touch spreading — a caress, some nails, and then the shiver that travelled along his skin, like a livewire reconnected by Adam’s touch.

There was a whole layout on his back, now. Ronan knew it perfectly from days and days spent letting Declan check on him — biopsies, and scans, and everything in between, because the drift scars had changed shape and they were _black_ , just like the goo he had spit out for months, even off the drift. But he knew them even better, purely by proxy, a tactile experience delivered by Adam who seemed to be obsessed with them at odd times.

Like now, with each of his fingers tracing what Ronan knew looked like the imprint of the wings they had evoked for Greywaren — right before they blew it up. Adam bit between his shoulder and his neck and Ronan fucked him hard, and hard, and _harder_ , his mind swaying over every comment Adam had made about his marks. 

He fucked him until he could not fuck him anymore but still tried to, tumbling messily to his knees. The floor hurt on impact, but Adam was high and safe in his arms, and Ronan nosed at his hair until Adam lifted his head and kissed him bruisingly. 

There was a low keening in Adam’s breath, trembling exactly like his body, and Ronan did not know if he was coming or just falling apart more subtly. 

The burning effort of each of his muscles to get back up with Adam in tow was worth the stupefied moaning laughter that Adam pressed against Ronan’s lips. They bumped again with the sink, and then the door frame, and then the cupboard — and at each of the stops Ronan ended up drowning in Adam’s body, hot and giving and his, his, _his_.

Ronan basically collapsed on the bed when they finally reached it, destroying the pristine smoothness of the duvet.

"Thanks for the show off," Adam mused, and it was difficult to feel really mocked, considering how his voice jumped between syllables.

Even more difficult still as Adam lessened the grip of his legs around Ronan's waist, rolling them over on the bed. 

"Jesus Christ," Ronan gritted out, as Adam settled over his lap — onto _his cock_ — pressing him down on the mattress with the same weight Ronan had been manhandling around.

"Ah, yes…" Adam agreed to nothing and everything at the same time, stretching his arms above Ronan's head on the bed.

His hips jerked in uneven, selfish motions, and Ronan could feel the goosebumps rising under his palms, high up on Adam's legs. Adam worked himself to a full shiver, and then a series of throaty sounds. Ronan dragged him down, pressing his lips on Adam's neck, and he felt the next moan as a vibration of skin against skin even before it slipped out of Adam's mouth.

They spiralled out from there, with Adam riding Ronan very hard, or very slow, depending on how distracting Ronan was being in his kisses and bites and caresses. 

Against the unfamiliar background of the hotel room, Adam was the only rightful centre of Ronan's world — his panting rounded in Ronan's ears, his heat, his fingers pressing on Ronan's face as if testing the reality of him. 

Ronan kissed his fingertips, letting them run over the roof of his mouth when Adam thrust them on. He felt Adam's shaking as he slid his tongue on the soft spot between each finger, over the line of Adam's palm. Then higher, and higher, teeth on his wrists following the line of his veins until he could suck on the bend of Adam's elbow. He was too taken to whine, but the mattress did it plenty in his place, as Adam shook on top of him.

"Ronan...Ronan…" 

There was something in Adam calling his name that always slithered between Ronan's ribcage like a knife headed towards the heart.

He rubbed his face against Adam's collarbones, overheated like the rest of him. Speech could not be trusted, not now, not like this, so he latched his mouth onto Adam's nipple until it was almost painfully hard and Adam squirmed away from his mouth with a full, wavering moan.

The movement seemed to take him by surprise, as if he stepped over a cliff. Ronan got to see Adam bending, and then arching as he came all over Ronan's chest. 

All the sickening, shocked pallor that had washed over his skin in the street at Scheveningen was gone, now. In its place, the flush spread insistently enough to paint even Adam's bronzed neck, and though he squirmed on Ronan's lap in unpredictable quiverings his eyes stayed fixed down. He did not stop moving, as they stared at each other — into each other — but he gradually collapsed over Ronan.

It felt like the only rightful place to be, one against the other.

Ronan wanted to keep fucking Adam forever, but as he turned on his side with Adam's cradled in his arms it felt like an impossible pursuit. Not with how Adam was kissing him, messy and uncoordinated, making Ronan breath his breath. Not with how Ronan was sure he could feel Adam's fast-paced heartbeat in this chest, right where it belonged.

"I can't stand it...when I can't feel you…" Adam moaned, unsteady words delivered with a furrowed brow.

"You feel me now? 'cause I feel you…" Ronan murmured back, feeling pleasure coil deep in his stomach, teasing his belly, over how fundamentally _true_ this was.

"Yeah," Adam said, coiled over him, forehead against forehead to the point of being out of focus in Ronan's eyes. "Yeah, I feel you...I feel you…I… _Ah_!"

Adam's slurred voice broke over in an overwhelmed moan as Ronan fucked with sudden abandon into him, coming all the way inside him sooner that he wanted over the slow clawing of Adam's nails all along his shoulders.

By the time he slipped out they were both hypersensitive, but they still held onto each other even though every contact was maddening. It was a wet, sticky, panting mess and Ronan never wanted to let go of Adam.

He did not want to when Adam looked impossible and reality seemed to bend at his will.

He did not want to when Adam was raw and human and fundamental in his being.

He did not want to, ever.

"I love you," he whispered, kissing over Adam's lips with reverence, as if three words could ever cover it.

"I love you too," Adam replied with ease, no need to think over it. "I love you and you're mine."

Not even the addition covered it, and they both knew it, but hearing it still made Ronan's head spin — as Adam Parrish was all too acquainted with absence, but he had still taken Ronan _for himself_.

"Yes," Ronan whispered, tightening his grip between Adam's hair because he could not _stand this_ , somehow. But their skins were cooling, and their hearts were still beating, and the world was a dangerous mystery but this was uncompromising. "Yes," he said again, and it was all that needed to be told.

  
  


* * *

  
  


"Where are they?"

Gansey's question was barely there, gone in a second with barely any movements of lips that someone capable might read from afar.

When he, Henry, and Blue had arrived ten minutes earlier Declan had gotten up immediately to deliver his first address to the plenary Court. It was well within his rights, as they had arranged for every technical aspect to be addressed by the Head of the Research, Development and implementation, in order to enforce the ranks of the Corps. The strident aspect was that in months of programming the consensus had been that Helen was supposed to open. And instead now she was missing altogether from the Court, and the two seats that labelled for Col. R. N. Lynch and Lt.-Col. A. Parrish were equally empty.

Gansey would have asked his parents, or to Maura and Calla, but the address for the two Generals and the two Lieutenant has been a closed door affair the previous month, so he did not have them within reach. 

"Coming. _Issues_ ," Declan telegraphed under his breath on his way back to his assigned seat.

There was no asking for a more detailed explanation, given the situation, but something in the hissing turn of the word _issue_ made the blood freeze in Gansey's veins.

A flash impression of Blue and Henry's expression returned every doubt that Gansey harboured right back at him. They had followed the plan, stayed under the radar — indulgently so, but they did check the comms through the night. Even through the radio silence _something_ must have happened.

As he mulled over the concept, with an expression schooled into a composed politeness, two attendants came up at the judges. This, too, was out of schedule, and two of the speakers got up to convene in private. They all stood very still, undismissed as they were, but there was a budding nervousness spreading through the audience.

The International Court of Justice did not work with unforeseen events, it was what came _after_ unforeseen events.

"The Court has elected to adjourn the order of the day for this hearing due to unprecedented circumstances brought to its attention," one the official speakers proclaimed. There was a wait mostly needed to the avalanche of camera flashes from the attending journalist and a fit of heated murmurs from the U.N. delegation. All the benches occupied by the Corps sat in military silence — well used to more detrimental change in drills. "I refer to the new debriefing folder on your authorised tables for the information on the three individuals we are going to present to you in the following section. And we welcome the rest of the Pan Pacific Defence Corps delegation."

Gansey allowed himself a single haste reaction, snatching the folder off the table immediately — though he knew that his mother would ignore hers for all the minutes necessary to convey how unfazed by the situation she was.

The new Intel contained the profile of three men linked to a mercenary organisation already known to the international community for terrorism, civil unrest and destabilising tactics. And all the details of an assassination attempt at the expenses of Col. Lynch and Lt.-Col. Parrish at approximately 20.15 hours of the day prior, in The Hague.

Gansey flipped through the recollection — enough to get to the "targets emerged unharmed" — and then over the pictures of the suspects. They were hardened men, with repertoire candid pictures snatched by the secret services during undercover operations. They entered the courtroom a minute after, heavily shackled and difficult to recognise.

Doing a superficial inventory of their damages was not without a certain satisfaction, because they were all in different states of battering. Gansey counted a broken nose, broken cheekbone, dislocated shoulder, ankle and knee injuries. Considering the wheelchair and the head bandages, one of them was at risk of a concussion.

The opposite door open thirty calculated seconds after, giving way to Helen, her hair freshly cut two days prior to showcase the whitened scars from Doomsday and the last upgrade of the prosthetic evident on the shiny knuckles of her hand. Ronan and Adam followed precisely two steps after, equally in high uniform. In juxtaposition with the three men, the bruise on Ronan's cheek looked like a badge of honour.

As they advanced through the room to greet the Court directly, something beyond the display of military discipline caught Gansey's eyes.

They stopped, polished boots sliding almost soundlessly on the floor and clicking into attention, releasing right after with their hands behind their backs. 

Every movement was mirrored in a way that could not be trained into someone — not the angle of the head, not the height at which the fingers grasped the opposite palm, not the studied relaxation of the shoulders.

Adam and Ronan were moving like two pilots off the drift, for the whole world to see.

It was beautiful and disconcerting, and Gansey could sense the nervousness in the room.

And yet, even in the presence of three hired assassins, the overall plan for the hearing seemed to remain stubbornly in place.

Adam and Ronan were sent to their seats as Helen remained at the bar. There was a subtle exchange of glances — _I'm gonna fuck them up_ , Ronan's expression told Gansey with the most subtle lift of a scarred eyebrow. When they sat down, it was once again with a harmony of movement that went beyond the humanly achievable. At this point, Gansey was not sure if it was a power act or he was witnessing something more subtle.

"Colonel Helen Margaret Gansey, this Court now asks for your recollection and assessments of the events of the Battle of Hong Kong."

It was a story that Gansey had heard several times over — first at the Med Bay, barely patched up and getting ahead of themselves; then at the meetings with the high ranks, patching up all the sides of the same day; eventually, through the debriefings for this same hearing, polishing their story for public compsuntion.

And yet it was different hearing it now, with Helen toeing the line between a military report and a performance. 

Nothing of it was emotional, for their mother’s teachings had instilled into them that displays of sentimentalism only appealed to the lower common denominator and invalidated the core of the facts — and the facts should back them, always, especially when the people would not. And yet the overall picture was vivid: the Corps reacting to an unwarranted attack, protocol after protocol and division over division falling in line to fold the City of Hong Kong, an evacuation and safeguarding of core tactical spots executed with the furious fight between three Jaegers in the background. 

“So you and Dr Lynch derouted your, we’ll quote you, _collateral damage containment_ in order to recover the pods of Colonel Gansey and Majors Cheng and Sargent. Wouldn’t your efforts be better spent in the core of the procedures you have been describing us?”

Gansey’s eyes caught Blue’s gaze in a flash, and they shared the same exasperation. The entire delegation of the Word Crisis and Threat Management special agency of the United Nations had been fond of conducting the arguments with one undertone only: the Pan Pacific Defence Corps had been inadequate in their response and borderline malicious in outlining their operations. 

Having had to admit to some disturbing details of the Mark-III Jaeger Initiative development did not help their case in looking beyond reproach for the Hong Kong attack, and everyone that spoke for Colin Greenmantle drilled into that angle at any given occasion.

“I would not say so; part of our efforts was exactly not to leave people in the crossfire and three pilots barely out of the Jaeger fighting zone leaves ground for emergency recovery. We did not deem the Raven King team as expendable, but neither did going into their support remove other resources. You have the detailed hierarchy of the coordination of the Lockdown protocols, where Dr Lynch and I fit at the time.”

Helen was as perfectly courteous and refined as she was glacial. It did not help when Vice-Secretary Greenmantle followed through in the address.

“Would you care to comment on how this _no one is expendable_ approach extended to the destruction of internationally funded properties, that arguably started with the fall of the Manila Shatterdome and culminated to the Mark-III series?”

“I most certainly can, Vice-Secretary, though my clearance in 2018 was not sufficiently high for direct involvement in the procedure,” Helen replied, with a voice smooth like hardstone. 

It was a slippery slope of trick questions and outright traps, but Gansey recognised the same resilience that used to guide him through battle in Glendower in each of the replies. 

"And in light of these events," one of the permanent judges of the Court asked. "How would you frame the attempted assassination reported for the two pilots of the Mark-III-1 team?"

There were a couple of seconds of thick silence, sufficient for the ball to drop on the fact that the preliminary debriefing had been sufficient for the Court to drop the "alleged" in front of the accusation.

"I believe that someone tries to make my cohorts pay the price of the unfolding of a deranged plan." Helen started, deceptively serene and staring forward at the Judge that addressed her. Only after she turned slowly to survey the full board — Greenmantle included "And I believe the Pan Pacific Defence Corps have been holding the line of a very long time. We haven't stopped."

The Court buzzed like a nest of wasps kicked down a field and resisted the call of order of the High Judge presiding the hearing.

In a room full of diplomats and politically aligned journalists, no one could resist the call of a conspiracy budding in their ranks.

Considering how eager the Court was to let Helen off the hook after this little stunt, and the fact that between her and Declan they had been in session for two and a half hours, everyone assumed they would take a break. However, a fresh wave of tension passes through the board members, conflict crackling through the air.

"This Court will now proceed with the hearing of Colonel Ronan Niall Lynch and Lieutenant Colonel Adam Parrish."

_They're going to keep grilling us until something slips_ , Gansey thought. And the little glint in Greenmantle's eyes suggested that he just got his way with things. The subtle jittering of Henry's leg right against Gansey's told him that everyone noticed.

Ronan and Adam sat in front of them, with the posture of someone very far from cracking. And yet it was also the same exact posture mirrored between the two of them, and a quick glance at the board confirmed to Gansey was he already knew: they were making everyone nervous. And they were not about to stop it.

If Helen's hearing had been dense, Ronan and Adam's was a lead ball pinning them all on the floor.

What strategy did they pursue in the Battle? Why did they not made a more extensive use of Dreamcatcher? Had every step pointed to damage minimisation? And if a direct core intervention was not standard procedure and the success rate had to be considered unknown, what had made them think forfeiting a pilot from the hutch was the most sensible approach?

With some dismay of the board and a mildly smug look from Declan, several points of the recollection were backed by extrapolated footage - where the drifting interface comms from Greywaren to Raven King had been isolated to be showcased.

"Isn't it very inconvenient that we don't have a full blackbox from Mark-III-1 to fill us in with all these cropped interaction," Vice-secretary Greenmantle commented, purposefully dropping any real interrogative tone.

"I'm not sure it would fix it," Ronan replied, composed but very far from deferential with no titles and no courtesies. "The drift did not require me and Parrish to speak."

“So you _require_ blind trust from this Court, after all.”

Adam’s head tilted just slightly — but so did Ronan’s, even though only Adam spoke. “We have trust on the Court’s ability of interpolating through partial information, sir.”

There were some snorts from the journalist sector of the room, which seemed to scorn Greenmantle. “The information is partial because you destroyed the Jaeger.”

“We wouldn’t have to, if _someone_ hadn’t sent two maniacs on our way… _sir_.” Ronan replied, and the single formality at the end seemed more of a display of how he could speak with Adam’s inflection rather than a heartfelt respectfulness. 

The room was markedly chilly after the exchange, and did not get any warmer with the further questioning on how exactly Ronan and Adam managed to evacuate a Jaeger that every external recording showed to have been perfectly mobile until the very last minute. 

No ghosts were cited, no dead was brought into the conversation.

“We warped the ejection as the self destruct sequence was reaching the zero,” Ronan said, as if he was not talking about their own life. “We had nothing to lose.”

That would only suffice half of the room — maybe three-quarters if someone remembered how the life of two men in their twenties should not be assumed to be disposable. It was probably wishful thinking.

It was almost two hours after when Helen had been dismissed by the Court that Greenmantle dropped a question that echoed what has already been heard before. 

“Assuming the required blind trust really fills all the gaps you’ve left us with,” he started, irritatingly dismissing hours of nitpicking as if every question had been left unanswered. “How would you frame what this court had decided to interpret as an assassination attempt directed at the two of you.”

“A failed move to silence the answers before you could dismiss them,” Ronan started.

Adam picked up spotlessly after, so smooth Gansey would have not been surprised to see drift connectors poking up their collars. “Would you like a rerun or two, Vice-Secretary Greenmantle?”

The air was sucked out of the room — and out of Gansey’s own lungs as well — before a cacophony of voices rose up in protest.

“—unprecedented accusation…”

“—reconsider the approach…”

“—elaborate more on the comments, Lieutenant Colonel…”

Helen got up, unprompted enough to win at least a stuttering stop to the commotion.

“High Judge Kumaresan, would you kindly confirm that the overseer of this court have found acceptable to introduce the devices found on the three gentlemen over there among the evidence for this hearing?” 

“This is not a penal hearing and it’s not…” Greenmantle started to protest. 

“It might very well become one, as far as I’m concerned,” the High Judge interjected, effectively silencing Greenmantle’s American English with her subtle Indian-accented one. She turned towards the three mercenaries. “We formally request full access on your devices, are you willing to provide the authentication?”

There was only a stubborn silence from the three men, staring forward without even acknowledging the words.

“You will be held in contempt of the Court, in addition to your fairly established crimes,” The Judge started. “We will have to then adjourn this session for our tech analysts to unlock the devices.” 

A flash glittered in Greenmantle eyes, barely there but enough for Blue to cast a glance at Gansey with the serious concern that they would never see those evidence again, out of this room.

“Or you could hand one of them to us now, Your Honour,” Ronan piped up, with a much different tone to the one he had used with Greenmantle. “Lieutenant Colonel Parrish is rather excellent with hacking.”

There was skepticism through the room, one that Gansey struggled not to share — Adam was many things, but a hacker was not one of them, even less so with Declan Lynch seating so close to them. And yet Ronan had that aftertaste in his tone that Gansey could recognise with _I can get away with murder_ — so they might as well wait and see. 

“We don’t _tamper_ with evidence in this Court,” one of the members of Greenmantle’s unit sputtered. 

“We’re having a worldwide broadcast, have we achieved a more minute system of monitoring while I was not looking?” The High Judge interrupted again, evidently fed up with the interruption. And yet she seemed to share the perplexity — she could allow this, but results were another issue. “Let me be clear, though, Lieutenant Colonel...we’re not going to hold this session for twenty more hours, you won’t be able to take the device out of the sealed bag, so I advise you to take into consideration the high-security standards of modern technology.”

“Thank you, Your Honour, it’s duly noted ma’am,” Adam murmured, with the first display of vague tension Gansey had seen in him since the beginning of this handless session.

It was stressful not to know if they were witnessing yet another reckless bluff like the ones they had played with Mr Gray, so many months ago, or this was more like another paradigm shift move from the team of Greywaren.

Maybe it was neither. 

Maybe it was something new altogether — with no ground for mutable lies, and no Jaeger left to pilot.

Gansey wished desperately he could see more than Adam and Ronan’s backs, that he could ask them if all of this was planned or Helen was carefully running with an approximated flow. The live footage did not suffice for this, as the both of them were looking down at the main tablet that had just been handed over to them — all packaged, and cracked at one corner as if someone had made it fall from a great height, just like Ronan had reportedly made the sniper fly off a balcony. 

Under the table, Ronan’s right hand turned with his palm up as Adam’s left hand slid over Ronan’s wrists. Seeing them hold hands in the middle of a courtroom would have been peculiar enough, but they sort of pressed them together, from the ball of the hand up. Their fingers twined, but not fully, with Ronan’s knuckles pressing Adam’s between his own. 

Gansey glanced at his own hands, scarred by the drift connectors, and could almost feel the pressure of their hold. It would be familiar, for all of them, because it was the same pressure that the Jaeger handles used to exert. 

Adam straightened, a little stiffer, and his face in the footage of fifteen cameras sported a little unsteady frown. And yet his right hand was steady as he hovered it over the plastic, fingers spread exactly like he had been holding onto Ronan. The screen of the tablet was lit, asking for what promised to be just the first one of the encryption authentication. 

He pressed one key, and then another, another three, gradually losing every pause that might have allowed for reflection.

It made no sense for Gansey to _feel it_ , but with Henry and Blue pressing closer to his side he knew they were sharing goosebumps.

In full view of the footage, the cracks on the glass screen shone of a faint blue — misleading like a reflection, familiar like a watermark.

In Gansey’s line of sight, the black lines that curled on the path of Ronan’s drifting scars seemed to shift, disorientingly. 

Everything in the room was too silent, almost stuffy.

Adam went through a thirty-five digits code, which unlocked another. Twenty-two digits after there was yet another, and the silence was breaking over the three men’s agitation — and too many barely-concealed hisses though Greenmantle’s team.

At the end of the fourth code, Ronan and Adam’s knuckles were white with the pressure exerted on them. Adam lifted his head and stared right at Vice-Secretary Greenmantle, smiling like a shark with two very bright eyes. 

“Joseph Kavinsky said you were furious when Manila didn’t go as planned,” Ronan said, in a tight, almost snarling voice. “Are you angry now, _Colin_?”

Adam entered the last sequence before Greenmantle could reply, and the content of the tablet began to unravel in full view of the camera broadcasting. 

Call, emails, servers, locations, and more importantly every little insurance document that the mercenaries must have collected in case their contractor attempted to circumvent them. 

Colin Greenmantle’s name was always there, or so strongly connected to be blatant even at a glance.

There was no quieting of the uproar of the room after, but Gansey was still staring at Adam and Ronan, holding onto each other like a lifeline.

  
  


* * *

  
  


In contrast with the scheduled three days of hearing, it took the International Court of Justice a little more than a week to disentangle the mess that Adam and Ronan had unleashed on it. Several more sessions were scheduled during the next months in order to properly process Colin Greenmantle and his extensive network of power-hungry sociopaths. 

It was not going to be pretty, and a part of Adam felt tired just thinking about it. 

For now, they were back at Amsterdam Airport, with their luggage and their military clearance. Blue and Henry had sneaked away to the terrace, in an understandable need for fresh air before the claustrophobic experience of an enclosed space over which they had no piloting control.

One fleeting look at Ronan had been enough for Adam to find an excuse and making himself scarce, and reroute towards a duty free where he did not intend to buy anything. Part of their security details had of course followed him, just as they had followed Blue and Henry to the terrace, but that was hardly important.

When he sneaked back into their private lounge, he heard Ronan and Gansey arguing way before getting them in view.

“We _are_ going back with you two to Hong Kong, don’t be ridiculous,” Gansey was saying. “We have to.”

“You really _fucking don’t_ , which is part of the damn point,” Ronan snarled back, always too heated but never really cutting, not towards Gansey. “Parrish and I are shackled by this Court bullshit, and we have...stuff to figure out.”

Adam leaned with his back towards one of the pillars of the room. If he closed his eyes, there were spots on the back of his eyelids, and among those spots flashes of Ronan and Gansey’s figures on the plastic chairs — or sometimes just Gansey’s face, as Ronan must be seeing them. 

He kept his eyes wide open, with a little knot on uncertainty in his stomach. 

“Is this about Adam?” Gansey asked, after a suspiciously long silence. “Is there something wrong with him?”

“There is nothing _wrong_ with him,” Ronan recoiled immediately, as if the concept was unacceptable if worded in this way. “But we have to be there, and if we all stick together we’ll make everyone nervous.”

“Did you speak with Helen about this?” Gansey asked, remorseful.

“And you fucking didn’t?”

There was no reply to this, because the only possible one was _of course_. Helen had been carefully taking the reins of the Corps, leveraging on her “uninvolved in the mess but involved in the fixing” situation. There were talks that she would substitute her parents in the role of General of the Corps, in a sign of good faith and willingness to clarify anything shady that the Corps might be handled in during the great war with the Kaijus.

“You know we make them nervous. We’re fucking pilots and they have to have us around without a Jaeger and…” Ronan trailed off, after the impetus of keeping the conversation going. “Gansey, we destroyed the Jaegers. We’ll have to see it through.”

More silence, a clear sign that Gansey was seeing the argument but was not so inclined to accept what it meant, pragmatically speaking. 

“How long?” Gansey asked, at the end.

“You can be dismissed, no one would refuse you. However long you want.”

“Ronan, I want to fucking strangle you,” Gansey hissed, in a rare feat of cursing. “How long until we either come back to you, or you join us?”

To this, Ronan did not have an answer. Adam had not had it either, until he did — like a bright line in plain view for him to follow.

“A couple of months,” he interjected, stepping away from the pillar and turning around the pillar to join them. Ronan’s inability to follow the rules of civil conversation was evidently growing on him, but the priority was decidedly different at the moment. “They’ll get to a verdict on Greenmantle earlier than expected...I think...and...and then Ronan and I can join you.”

Ronan was staring up at him, with that gaze that made Adam feel _known_. Unavoidable, and yet Adam still stubbornly looked over to Gansey, and Gansey only.

“You could have something ready for us, for when we join you,” Adam added, pushed forward by an uncontrollable urge. The neon lights were shining too brightly above them, hurting Adam’s eyes. “Could you not?”

“I…” Gansey started, and then trailed off, getting up from his chair and close to the huge floor-to-ceiling windows of the airport, facing the runaways and the planes. 

He stood there for long enough that Ronan went to join him, with that peculiar earnestness that always made them look like they had been cut from the same batch — brothers, in every way that mattered.

“I’ve never been this close to the U.K. in...I think at least four years, isn’t it, Ronan?” Gansey murmured, at the end. 

Ronan nodded subtly. “Henry and the maggot will come with you.”

“It won’t be the same, I can’t do it without you.”

“You don’t...you don’t have to,” Ronan stuttered a bit, tense in a way that made Adam want to be close — still, he kept his distance and let them speak. “We’ll join you.”

“I can’t believe you’re making me leave you behind _again_.”

There was a crack in Gansey’s voice that made them all freeze. _You have to go_ , once again. It was so easy, but sounded so more tragic now — and that, too, was Ronan and Adam’s fault even though they had not meant it that way.

“It’s not the same fucking thing,” Ronan hissed, too close to broken for comfort. 

Gansey turned around and pulled Ronan close by the nape, his hand spanning over the black lines left over by the drift collapse. They ended up clicking with each other, complementary as they were, face against shoulder to each other.

“You have two months and then I’ll come and find you and we’ll discuss it again because we’re not leaving you two behind,” Ganse murmured, rushed like a river tumbling down. 

“Fuck you, in two months you better tell me how we find your Welsh king,” Ronan murmured back, with a hand fisted over Gansey’s shirt. When he turned his head, Adam caught a glimpse of his eyes, cloudy with tears, and felt just as helpless.

He backed away a couple of steps, and then some more. 

When he exited the room, Gansey and Ronan were still hugging as if sending each other out of Shatterdome-distance would send the world spiralling into destruction. But Gansey had always been — and still was — a fixture in Ronan’s brain, ingrained in his very breathing, so maybe it would.

And yet Gansey had said that he was not going to leave _the two of them_.

Adam had never handled family well, but as he left Gansey and Ronan their space and went to talk to Blue and Henry, he thought he should figure it out as soon as possible.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Fifty four days, nine hours and a handful of minutes had passed since the moment Ronan had watched a very mundane, civilian plane took off from Amsterdam Schiphol, taking Gansey, Blue and Henry away to London Heathrow. It had been what he had wanted, what he and Adam had discussed, and yet living through it turned up to be a dull kind of hell.

Ronan had seen Amsterdam three more times since, eight more if one considered every video conference and diplomatic visit that had come to the Hong Kong Shatterdome. 

The case was closing around Colin Greenmantle, _asshole extraordinaire_ , and in the process it had uprooted what always hid under the carpet of every big operation.

Corruption, trafficking, terrorism, extortion — if it was profitable while morally despicable and fundamentally promised to hand over the world into few very greedy hands when the alien threat was finally over, Colin Greenmantle had coordinated it.

Ronan was deeply aware of it all, had set through more meetings he had ever bothered to in ten years in the Corps. Helen and Declan were focused on the issue like sharks that had just smelled blood in the water — and just as efficient in pursuing it. He was, by contrast, fundamentally tired. 

And Adam was tired as well.

They could work with making people talk, infiltrate in dangerous areas to provide the last crackdown, design some very excellent traps even. But this was a war on politics and people, and they both found they did not like it.

In Adam’s case both the tiredness and the not-liking-it bits might have a very strong correlation to what Ronan — and sometimes, very hushedly and privately, the rest of the high ranks too — had taken to call _the vision_. It brought light at the back of Adam’s pupil, statics at the tip of his fingers, and answer where everyone else just had questions. 

“It’s obviously the drift,” Ronan had whispered to him, under a pile of blankets that enclosed them away from the world in one late night that merged into early morning.

“So obviously, and I still don’t understand how,” Adam had uttered back, his face moving against Ronan’s shoulder at the pace of his words.

But they had made use of it even before the _obviously_ — it had saved Ronan’s life, it had unlocked the tablets, it kept giving them some bits and pieces scattered around this whole mess — so it felt pointless to question it.

“It’s better with you, I can’t handle it without you,” Adam had added, as if it was a necessary caveat. 

Ronan did not think it was true. He thought Adam could handle it as well as he handled everything else that ever crossed his path, Ronan included. And yet the uncompromising certainty of it warmed him up from the marrow of his bones — because Ronan was not sure he could handle _anything_ without Adam.

“That’s bullshit, you’re just having...a bit of a hard time,” Adam told him, sitting on the floor of the shower rooms in the middle of a different night. The stream of the shower fell between them, and Adam patiently cleaned up the black gooey substance out of the corner of Ronan’s eyes, his nostrils, his ears. 

“What if I’m dying,” Ronan whispered, and the darkness behind his closed eyes felt threatening in itself, but at least shielded him from having to look at Adam while saying it. 

“You’re not dying,” Adam replied, without missing a beat, and stroking a wet hand over Ronan’s shaved head to try and prompt him to look back. “Ronan…”

“It’s happening more rather than less. I can’t fucking sleep or I wake up with _this shit_ and then we’re back at it again. So how can you _know_?”

“I thought we established that I know an awful lot of things,” Adam bristled. 

Ronan’s approach tended to be that Adam knew everything worth knowing, and yet the tone in this case told him that not even Adam was sure — one way or another, at least. Ironically, that might put Ronan in the _normal_ situation of fifty-fifty life or death on any given day, just like the rest of the world. 

They had not argued further — because neither of them wanted it — but it had lingered between them, every day after in which sleeping became a threat to Ronan blackness-free self. 

At day fifty four, nine hours and handful of minutes, Ronan was not sleeping. But he was tired, sitting on the bleachers of the empty training room with an equally tired Adam, and his phone lay between them with the screen still on after a long call with Gansey.

The trio was in Aberystwyth, short for _Unpronounceable Fucking Welsh_ town, and Gansey apparently stuck a deeply unusual friendship with an old academics called Mallory who had strong opinions about tea and called Blue Jane as well.

It sounded like fun, it sounded like _life_ , and Ronan just felt like he was drowsily floating in a bubble. Was he falling asleep, or was he waking up?

“The Court is gonna close the first core by next week,” Adam whispered, out of nowhere. When Ronan turned to look at him, he was staring at one of the neon lights on the ceiling, unblinkingly. It was terrifying for a lot of people to witness — sometimes even for Calla and Maura, even though they would not admit it — but it made Ronan’s chest bubble with something all too similar to adoration. 

“Let’s go for a ride,” Ronan countered, incongruent and maybe out of tune, but Adam’s attention snapped promptly back on him and he was _there_ , with Ronan, eyes just as bright and made brighter by the proposal.

It was an ungodly hour in the night and the Shatterdome — gradually draining of personnel and not working on punishing shifts anymore — felt like an empty skeletron full of echoes of a war that already lingered in the distance.

The way up the Lantau Peak mountain was as dreadful as it always was at night, harsh and requiring so much concentration into handling the BMW Ronan was almost surprised they did not crash out of the road spectacularly.

“I don’t feel so well,” he confessed to Adam, for as dreadful it might sound to hear something like that from the guy who had called for this little trip. 

“It’s very dark,” Adam replied, as if it made any sense. He had sunk more deeply into the passenger's seat and stared forward on the road that was either white from the headlights or pitch black from the night. “Isn’t it always, before dawn?”

Ronan did not know what to say, but silence was nice with Adam, so he said nothing and just willed his eyelids to stop batting so furiously.

At the very top, the air was freezing and the wind was strong that Ronan had imagined, and not even that seemed to shake the exhaustion out of him. 

“Let’s seat in the back,” Adam suggested, smiling like a trickster god.

Ronan had rarely been as grateful for something as it was for the backstead of the BMW, and Adam’s thighs under his head when he slid down to lay against them. 

His tongue was thick and glued in his mouth, and his eyelids were so heavy Ronan was afraid he would never lift them again. 

Everything was dark, actually, so he must have fallen asleep. 

And then there were lines sparking and spreading, like a thunder — or a road. 

“Do you think we can walk this?” Ronan asked Adam.

He was always with him, so of course he was here as well, just at Ronan’s side when he turned to look. 

Adam shrugged, a beacon in the darkness and loneliness. “I did it once before. And we’ll be together.”

So they walked, even though there was just light and dark. And then there were not, and there was water, enough to fill an ocean but perfectly, unnaturally flat. 

Adam kneeled on the surface of it and somehow he did not sunk. Maybe, in the intricate logic of dreams, it was because Ronan was holding his hand — it would make sense.

The water did not reflect him, but it reflected everything else. 

This world, other worlds. Their drifts, other drifts. Cabeswater, that travelled through space and time, and had poured over the Earth through the Pacific Rim. They had closed the Rim, and annihilated the cores — but Cabeswater had been, so it always would be. 

Adam’s hand skimmed on the surface, his eyes so lost.

“ _I will be your hands_ ,” Adam’s voice echoed, from so many months ago. “ _I will be your eyes_.”

He had been and he was. 

The thunder started to spark even through the water, tracing a path of pure light for everyone to follow.

But they were not everyone, they were Adam and Ronan, and so the path showed them the ruins of an old castle, and Gansey, Henry and Blue that walked among them at the hesitant pace of an unknown old man. 

This was very up close. Very present, very intense, very real. 

Ronan wished for perspective, and the ocean showed them the old roads around the castle. The forests that had been, and the harbours that had sunk. Trails that had shouldered such strengths that they were traced by thunder. 

“I’d love to remember this,” Ronan sighed to Adam. “Show it to Gansey when we go to the others.”

“Do you want to go soon?” Adam asked him, getting up from his kneeling. The water did not even crease at the movement.

“I want to go like _yesterday_.”

Adam’s laughter echoed lovely through dark, water and thunder. “What about a map, then?”

It made sense, everything was just there in the water. Would it not be easier if Ronan could just show Gansey the water?

The thought made Ronan all too eager and he crashed his hand through the surface of the ocean, half afraid that the trail of thunder will fade and his desperate yearning will be left unfulfilled. 

The thunder crackled, thick like ozone on his tongue, and the darkness around it wrinkled on the surface of the water, in a perfect balance that would not spill over that easily — not if Ronan kept the thunder lit. 

His eyes flashed open and just like that he was awake. He wanted to gasp for air but for some seconds he was desperately still, the world too narrow around him as it had always been in Greywaren after using Dreamcatcher.

Adam was looking down on him — all too intently, all too awake. There was a light at the back of his pupils, light blue and dancing like an oxygenate flame. He was perfect, and mutable like water, and the very sight of him released something deep inside Ronan.

He sighed, finally, and then coughed — but this time, there was no black gooey substance dribbling out of him. His back throbbed as if something was twisting along it. 

Pressed against his chest there was a thick bundle of folded paper. 

Ronan lifted it with shaking hands, and it unfolded into something surreal — old like a stroll, neatly drawn over in light ink like a blueprint. At the top, with the same bulky letters the tech team used in its hand-outs, it was titled: _WALES_.

It had not existed before, and it did now.

A dream, caught.

Above him, Adam’s face was slowly splitting in a smile, but Ronan jumped ahead of him and laughed, loud and heady and just a little bit hysterical.

Outside, the darkness was slowly losing its grip to a deep blue, precipitating into orange as the sun rose over the Pacific Ocean.

No one had ever bothered to tell Ronan about the fate of a hero in a world that had overcome the edge of disaster.

But now he was over that edge, and over all the edges that came after. 

Someone was waiting for him at the other side of the world, someone was kissing the heady disbelief out of his face, and _impossible_ needed a new meaning.  


No one had ever bothered to tell him, but Ronan thought he figured it out.  


The answer seemed to be: _freedom_.

  
  
  
_As long as I dream, it ain't over, ain't over_  
_I'll bring the chains of gravity_  
_Oh, I long for your fire, yeah, I long for your fire_  
_My heart is lost between the stars_  
_[[Supernova - Within Temptation]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH8LVfiDp3w)_

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's surreal to be here and I honestly don't know what to do with myself.
> 
> I would like to give the loudest shout out EVER to Rachel (purrsnicket) who not only did the two amazing movie poster art of this fic, but also betaed every bit of this crazy wordcount. She's the best, and I would have never made it without her, and yet this event has been the first time we really interacted and cooperated. It has been GLORIOUS.
> 
> Other very loud shout out to the people that had started this journey with me in the Prologue and commented EVERY DAMN STEP OF THE WAY. I hope you understand how much I love you and cherish you, and that I would have not made it without you.
> 
> The last shout is for you, whoever you are, reading this. This fic is the most monumental work I've ever produced, you just read six months of my life distilled into writing. For every moment you dedicated to reading this, thank you.
> 
> Meta-art note, "Supernova" is the official Pynch song for this AU, but in general the album Resist from Within Temptation has been, and will always be, my Beyond The Edge Of Our Hope soundtrack. A large amount of scenes of this fic have been daydreamed while I listened to it. Consider checking it out, and for those among you that haven't seen Pacific Rim but are still here (I! LOVE! YOU!), rememberer that the soundtrack of that movie is FUCKING LIT.
> 
> And with this, I think I will stop blabbering.
> 
> I'm always available on [My Tumblr](http://seekthemist.tumblr.com), ask box is open and I'm very much #Galaxybrain about the whole universe of this fic so remember I might have additional shit to say if you just hit me up.
> 
> If you made it this far, consider dropping me a word in the comment.
> 
> And now we, too, are beyond the edge.
> 
>  
> 
> ~Mist


End file.
